Research Intern - Proactive Interaction Agents

Job description

About Huawei Research and Development UK Limited Founded in 1987, Huawei is a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. We have 207,000 employees and operate in over 170 countries and regions, serving more than three billion people around the world. Our vision and mission is to bring digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. To this end, we will drive ubiquitous connectivity and promote equal access to networks; bring cloud and artificial intelligence to all four corners of the earth to provide superior computing power where you need it, when you need it; build digital platforms to help all industries and organizations become more agile, efficient, and dynamic; redefine user experience with AI, making it more personalized for people in all aspects of their life, whether they’re at home, in the office, or on the go. This spirit of innovation has led Huawei to work in close partnership with leading academic institutions in the UK to develop and refine the latest technologies. With a shared commitment to innovation and progress, both parties have worked together to achieve common goals and establish a strong partnership. The partnership between UK and Huawei help to develop the technologies of the future that will transform the way we all communicate, work and live. For the past 30 years we have maintained an unwavering focus, rejecting shortcuts and easy opportunities that don't align with our core business. With a practical approach to everything we do, we concentrate our efforts and invest patiently to drive technological breakthroughs. This strategic focus is a reflection of our core values: Staying customer-centric, Inspiring dedication, Persevering, Growing by reflection. Huawei Research and Development UK Limited Overview Huawei’s vision is a fully connected, intelligent world. To achieve this, we work to inspire passion for basic research around the world. Our combined passion drives development across the global innovation value chain. Huawei has the largest Research and Development organization in the world with 96,000+ employees in research centers around the globe. In the UK, we already have design centers in Cambridge, London, Edinburgh and Ipswich. We continue to explore and define new research directions and new services. We have expanded our collaborations with academic researchers; researched new network architectures, integration of communications and key enabling technologies; and developed the fundamental theories of these technologies. We invite you to join us on this exciting journey and drive your career forward. Job Summary Huawei Technologies (UK) Co., Ltd. London office is seeking a Research Intern, Proactive Interaction Agents, to help design and build the next generation of personalized proactive AI systems. The role will focus on proactive interaction agents that infer likely user needs from digital and multimodal context, decide when and how to intervene, and surface useful information or actions with low latency and high precision. This is a research-engineering role at the intersection of AI agents, personalization and memory, retrieval and recommendation, multimodal context fusion, and real-world product prototyping. The successful candidate will contribute both to novel technical directions and to robust prototype systems for proactive contextual assistance across devices and interaction surfaces. Key Responsibilities: Design and implement proactive interaction agent systems that infer likely user-desired actions or information from digital context such as chats, calls, notifications, calendar, search, app activity, location, and profile state. Develop core modules for personalized memory, intent and action inference, interruption timing and restraint, interaction-surface selection, and low-latency execution. Build retrieval, recommendation, and RAG-style components for candidate generation, ranking, clarification, and action preparation in proactive assistance settings. Prototype multimodal and wearable-context extensions using signals from phone, watch, glasses, audio, motion, or other sensors as supporting evidence for intent and timing. Design and run evaluations and benchmark pipelines for proactive assistance, including intent prediction, intervention policy, latency, personalization quality, and user-utility tradeoffs. Collaborate with researchers and engineers to turn new ideas into working prototypes, technical reports, and, where appropriate, publications or open-source contributions. This job description is only an outline of the tasks, responsibilities and outcomes required of the role. The jobholder will carry out any other duties as may be reasonably required by his/her line manager. The job description and personal specification may be reviewed on an ongoing basis in accordance with the changing needs of Huawei Research and Development UK Limited. Person Specification: Required: MSc or PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related technical field. Strong programming skills in Python and good software engineering experience building reliable research prototypes or production-oriented AI systems. Hands-on experience with LLMs, AI agents, RAG, recommender systems, multimodal models, or related decision-making systems. Experience with at least one modern ML stack such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow, and familiarity with agent/tooling frameworks such as LangChain/Graph, AutoGen, LlamaIndex, or similar. Good understanding of prompt and context engineering, tool use, memory/state handling, and practical evaluation of agent systems. Ability to work effectively in a fast-moving research environment with evolving goals, open-ended technical problems, and close interaction between research and product direction. Desired: Research experience or strong technical interest in proactive assistance, personalization, recommender systems, human-AI interaction, decision-making under uncertainty, or multimodal/wearable AI. Familiarity with current literature on AI agents, proactive interaction, memory-augmented systems, tool use, long-context systems, or mobile and wearable assistants. Track record of research contribution, such as publications at strong ML/AI venues (e.g. ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, JMLR), technical reports, benchmarks, open-source projects, and/or patents. Experience with low-latency systems, on-device or edge inference, mobile/wearable sensing, or cloud-edge deployment architectures. Experience designing evaluation tasks or datasets involving user context, intent prediction, timing policy, or personalized assistance. Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across multidisciplinary research and engineering teams. What we offer Assign with an industry expert as Mentor Fixed term employment contract up to two years 33 days annual leave entitlement per year (including UK public holidays) Group Personal Pension Employee Assistance Programme Life insurance Corporate social events