Your work will be part of the OH-SMArt project, a long term initiative to significantly improve the digital research chain around using Oral History and spoken narratives. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is part of this chain.

We are seeking a junior researcher for a full-time 17 months-long position who will be responsible for the implementation and evaluation of an open-source Dutch ASR end-to-end system such as Wav2Vec or Whisper in the CLARIAH research infrastructure. Speech recognition services in the infrastructure are docker based and should be able to run on computer clusters at member organizations (e.g., Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, DANS, SURF) to enable processing of data sets on a large scale. Working together with teams at these organizations will be part of the work.

Your tasks will involve:

• Implementation of open-source end-to-end speech technology for Oral History in an existing infrastructure
• Evaluation of the implemented ASR system and comparison with current systems (Kaldi based).
• Optionally, fine-tuning of system performance in collaboration with currently running projects on Dutch ASR in the Netherlands.

For the implementation of the ASR, you will work together with speech technology researchers from Radboud University (Nijmegen) and CLARIAH development teams at Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.

• You have a Master Degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• You have knowledge and experience in deep learning and preferably have applied this knowledge in speech technology.
• You have experience with Docker or other similar container technologies
• You have good programming skills, particularly Python.
• You have good team spirit, excellent communication and social skills, and like to work in an internationally oriented environment where many cultures meet.
• Proficiency in Dutch is welcome but not required.
• As a junior researcher you are keen to take on responsibility and you are capable of planning and executing your work individually.

• You will be appointed for a period of maximum 17 months within a very stimulating scientific environment. The university offers a dynamic ecosystem with hardworking colleagues.
• Your salary and associated conditions are in accordance with the collective labour agreement for Dutch universities (CAO-NU);
• Gross salary between € 2960 and € 3703 per month depending on experience and qualifications;
• Excellent benefits including a holiday allowance of 8% of the gross annual salary, a year-end bonus of 8.3% and a solid pension scheme;
• The flexibility to partially work from home;
• Free access to sports facilities on campus
• A minimum of 232 leave hours in case of full-time employment based on a formal workweek of 38 hours. A full-time employment in practice means 40 hours a week, therefore resulting in 96 extra leave hours on an annual basis.
• Excellent support for research and facilities for professional and personal development.
• We encourage a high degree of responsibility and independence, while collaborating with close colleagues, researchers and other university staff.
• We are also a family-friendly institution that offers parental leave (both paid and unpaid) and career support for partners.

You will be positioned in the Human Media Interaction (HMI) group of the University of Twente, the Netherlands, and you will be a part of a dynamic, multidisciplinary team. The HMI lab does research into multimodal interaction: from interactive playgrounds to social robots. It is a multidisciplinary group in which computer science meets social science to investigate and design and evaluate novel forms of human-computer interaction. In addition, the junior researcher will be part of the OH-SMArt project, a long-term initiative to significantly improve the digital research chain around using Oral History and spoken narratives, with research into artworks and museums as a use case.