The School of Information (iSchool) at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) invites applicants for up to two tenure-track Assistant Professor positions to start in Fall 2025. Candidates will be expected to conduct innovative and impactful research and to teach at both graduate and undergraduate levels. Tenure-track faculty in our iSchool normally have a 2/1 teaching load, with various opportunities for course release, particularly pre-tenure. Salaries are competitive.

As an interdisciplinary academic unit, our faculty are drawn from a wide range of different disciplines and collaborate broadly with other units on campus. We welcome applications from diverse disciplines including (but not limited to): information science, computer science, data science, electrical and computer engineering, human-centered computing, computational science, computational linguistics, and design.  We seek strong scholars with compelling research agendas, regardless of disciplinary background. Applicants, especially those unfamiliar with Information Schools, are welcome to contact us prior to submitting their application to discuss how their research connects to our school (see contact address below). See resources from the international iSchools organization for additional background.

Building AI systems

We seek candidates who investigate human-centered artificial intelligence (AI) systems through designing, building, and technically evaluating such systems. Our call is intended to be broadly inclusive of the range of AI subdisciplines and areas such as (but not limited to): machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), computer vision (CV), and generative AI and large language models (LLMs), etc. Candidates should develop AI systems in their research that advance support for human work or activities, e.g., by augmenting and amplifying the capabilities of individuals or groups of people.

Research directions in this area may include (but are not limited to):

• Innovative methods and applications that integrate AI with human computation
• Complementary human-AI teaming and supportive workflow design
• Human-in-the-loop decision-making and decision-support
• AI-assisted data annotation
• Accelerating and improving human-centered AI evaluation protocols
• Imagining other novel forms of human-AI partnerships

Potential outcomes of such research may include (but are not limited to):

• Advancing fundamental understanding of the nature and range of human-AI partnerships, as well as how best to design, build, and evaluate them
• Investigating potential productivity benefits, such as the speed, scale, quality, and/or economics of human labor with vs. without AI-augmentation
• Advancing ethical and responsible design for system users, AI supply-chain workers, and/or society at-large around issues such as: trustworthiness and reliability; transparency and interpretability; fairness and social justice (for both AI users and workers); and accountability and algorithmic recourse
• Protecting private and sensitive data; the information environment and information integrity; human safety, health, and wellbeing; and the environment, via sustainable, green computing

AI at UT Austin and the iSchool

We anticipate that faculty hired by this search will greatly benefit from UT’s strong and continuing investments in AI at-large, as well as its investments in responsible AI in particular.

UT Austin has a world-class reputation for AI research and education, with consistently high rankings for our AI programs across campus. We have largest AI program from a tier-one university (our online MS in Artificial Intelligence). Launched in 2023, this is the first large-scale degree program of its kind and the only master’s degree program in AI from a top-ranked institution priced close to $10,000. This complements UT’s existing online master’s programs in computer science and data science, highlighting some of the many AI-related programs and courses offered across campus.

This year, UT announced a “Year of AI”, committing to invest significant additional resources in AI research and education. This included the launching of a new Center for Generative AI, which hosts the world’s largest academic GPU cluster and whose team includes a member of the iSchool faculty. The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) provides world-class AI compute resources to UT faculty and received a $457M award this year from the national science foundation (NSF) to create a new leadership class computing facility expected to provide a 100x improvement for AI applications. In 2020, the NSF also selected UT to lead the $20M NSF AI Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning (IFML), UT was recently awarded a second $20M Institute, the NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins (CosmicAI), co-directed by an iSchool faculty member.

Responsible AI at UT Austin and the iSchool

As prominently noted at https://yearofai.utexas.edu, “Responsible AI for a Better Tomorrow” is key to UT Austin’s vision for the future of AI technologies. In 2019, UT’s president announced a campus-wide responsible AI initiative, Good Systems (http://goodsystems.utexas.edu), that today boasts over 120 active researchers across 30 academic units. Good Systems equips the university with the structural capacity to integrate technology, policy, law, and ethics in the pursuit of societal good. The iSchool’s faculty have played a prominent role in Good Systems, serving in the overall leadership team and leading its core research projects. Two iSchool faculty also recently helped secure a 5-year, $3M NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) award to address the challenge of integrating responsible and ethical AI at all stages of development, design, and deployment of AI technologies (https://ethicalai.utexas.edu). This also led to the creation of a new cross-campus Graduate Portfolio Program in Ethical AI. Multiple campus-wide cluster hires from the Provost’s office have yielded iSchool hires in ethical AI and protecting the information environment. Additional work on responsible AI in the iSchool includes (but is not limited to) research on responsible AI policy, design, and data collection and stewardship, including the ethical sourcing of AI training data.

Applicants must hold a Ph.D. in a field relevant to their area of research and teaching or convincingly demonstrate they will complete the degree before starting (e.g., by documenting a scheduled defense). In general, we seek candidates with outstanding records of research, teaching, service, and leadership abilities, with a commitment to shaping the future of our iSchool and conducting innovative research in their respective research field(s). Applications should make a compelling case for the intellectual contribution and merit of their research agenda. Candidates are encouraged to identify the research communities in which they belong and to which their research trajectory will contribute.

About School of Information, the University of Texas at Austin

The UT Austin iSchool is a premier research and education program for the 21st century field of information. We are a founding member of the international iSchools organization and have a long history of interdisciplinary scholarship and research focused on the human, social, cultural, and technical aspects of information. Our program is consistently ranked among the top five programs in information in the world. We are a stand-alone school with strong connections across the university and with other institutions nationally and internationally. We are particularly interested in applicants who will further strengthen and extend our collaborative network. The University of Texas at Austin has an internationally distinguished faculty making it one of the world’s leading research universities. UT Austin embraces interdisciplinary research and is home to more than 200 dedicated research units, centers, and research grand challenges. In 2020, UT Austin proudly earned the Hispanic Serving Institution designation.

Connections working at School of Information, the University of Texas at Austin