Ph.D. Data Scientist
Chicago, IL

Job Description

Ph.D. Data Scientist

Vail Systems, Inc. Company Profile

The human voice is capable of conveying nuances and meaning that just can't be expressed through clicks and text messages. And for that reason, voice interactions have always had a special power to shape our perceptions and experiences. At Vail, we believe in the unique power of voice interactions to create more expressive, more intimate, and more efficient interpersonal interactions. Our experts work with Fortune 500 companies to help them serve their customers more efficiently and effectively through the use of various voice technologies. From basic network services, to state-of-the-art IP telephony, to cutting edge real-time analytics, Vail technology makes millions of voice interactions better every day.

Ph.D. Data Scientist

As millions of interactions move though our networks, billions of packets of voice data are analyzed by our systems. Using proprietary technology, we're measuring things like voice clarity, emotion, and voice stress to better understand and react to changes in conversations. This analysis has opened the door to new solutions that measure customer satisfaction, speech intelligibility, and fraud propensity in real time. These are practical applications of big data analytics at work.

We're looking to add a Data Scientist to our real-time analytics team. This team is on a mission to explore the wealth of voice data available, looking for insights that may lead to new and powerful business applications. Like the data we're analyzing, the work is unstructured and the solutions aren't always clear. It makes for a continual challenge that will require an individual who demonstrates:

* An analytical and creative mind
* A keen eye for pattern recognition
* Natural mathematical ability
* A computational mindset
* A high tolerance for ambiguity
* A highly collaborative disposition
* A positive disposition and a can-do attitude
* The maturity to perform research independently

Essential Responsibilities and Deliverables:

As a Data Scientist, you'll be analyzing and experimenting with interaction data to find patterns in system or user behavior that can be used to inform business actions. For example, you will be involved in the analysis of audio waveforms helping to uncover patterns of audible factors that represent negative conversational dynamics in a call center. You may also develop models that use semantic context to fill in garbled or unrecognizable utterances without changing the meaning of the underlying sentence or phrase. You'll then develop prototype applications in Python, MatLab, or R, that recognize these patterns to generate real-time event data that can be channeled into user applications. Most of your work will be done from either our Chicago Loop office or our Deerfield headquarters, however you should also expect to interact directly with our clients from time to time.

To be considered for this position, you must have:

* Ph.D. degree in computer science with emphasis on NLP, or computational

linguistics

* Peer-reviewed publications in machine learning, NLP, machine translation,

or related fields

* Experience in modeling frameworks (R, SciKit, Tensorflow, Keras)
* Experience in Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text technologies
* Knowledge of systems-related issues in NLP frameworks
* Strong interest in statistical language models, statistical semantic

models, language grammars and dialogue systems

* Experience and knowledge in traditional machine learning algorithms and

deep learning frameworks (recurrent neural networks, convolutional neural

networks, LSTM, etc.) applied to NLP domain

* Knowledge of word segmentation and entity extraction
* Strong communications and writing experience

Ideally you will also be able to demonstrate:

* Experience with statistical coding involving machine learning or pattern recognition especially in audio applications
* An understanding of or interest in linguistics and conversational systematics
* Curiosity about phonetics and languages
* Experience in original scholarship in collaboration with a team
* Experience extracting, manipulating and curating large datasets
* Application development experience in an advanced object-oriented language such as C++, Python or Java

If you enjoy solving complex puzzles; if you are fascinated by the dynamics of human communication; if you want to help develop technology that helps people communicate more freely and effectively; talk to us!