Internship Opportunity in the Directorate of Connectivity and Secure Communications.
ESA is an equal opportunity employer, committed to achieving diversity within the workforce and creating an inclusive working environment. We therefore welcome applications from all qualified candidates irrespective of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, beliefs, age, disability or other characteristics. Applications from women are encouraged.
Location Harwell
Our team and mission
This position is based at the European Centre for Space Applications and Telecommunications (ECSAT) - Harwell, UK
IMPORTANT: Due to the location of the ECSAT, only the students enrolled in a UK University or students with a UK citizenship or the right to work in the UK can apply to this internship.
Under the direct authority of the Systems, Strategic Programme Lines and Technology Department, the Future Programmes Division is responsible for:
- The management of ARTES Generic Programme Line Future Preparation;
- The scouting, recommendation of innovative and disruptive satellite communication concepts and solutions;
- The elaboration in close coordination with Strategic Programme Lines of new innovative and disruptive satellite connectivity and secure communications concepts and solutions;
- The management of the technology and system exploration (iteration, innovation, disruption) in support of the technology work plans and roadmaps and for the creation of new projects that could lead to creation of new programmes. For example, the implementation of competitions, hackathons, co-creation framework;
- The technical and programmatic consolidation of new telecommunications system projects in partnership with private and/or public entities;
- Leading standardisation, regulatory and spectrum engineering support activities for the Directorate;
- The coordination of functional and integrated support provided by other ESA Directorates and ESA Security Office in collaboration with other departments.
For further information visit our web site: http://www.esa.int
Field(s) of activity for the internship
Topic: Internship in application of NLP technologies for Mission Brainstorming Assistance
Background
The European Space Agency generates a vast amount of information in the form of technical reports, project plans, and other documentation. With the exponential growth of data, there is a need for efficient and effective knowledge management tools that can extract meaningful information from these reports.Objectives
The objective of this internship is to explore the use of advanced Natural Language Processing (e.g. Large Language Models) for improving knowledge management in satellite communications projects reports. More specifically, the main research objective of this internship would be to develop an AI-based Conversational agent (or ChatBot) focusing on information-retrieval, summarizing and question-answering capabilities.
To fine-tune the model with relevant domain-specific knowledge, you will be provided with all the ARTES Future Preparation (FP) reports, which will account for hundreds of documents to be pre-processed and examined by the ChatBot. An important aspect of this research is the potential to expand the scope of the model with other datasets.
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To that end, you will perform the following tasks
Task 1: State-of-art review
Analyse the strengths and limitations of existing LLMs in the context of satellite communications data reports (ARTES FP reports).Task 2: Data Pre-processing
Pre-process the data (in the form of pdf and word format) to prepare it for LLM analysis.Task 3: Build the ChatBot
Develop an LLM-based conversational agent/ ChatBot that enables question-answering over the dateset in which the LLM has been fined-tuned with
This opportunity will allow you to be exposed to the work done in Future Preparations and Future Projects under the Connectivity and Secure Communications directorate of ESA, as well as to interact with a multi-disciplinary engineering environment covering all Satcom technology domains.Behavioural competencies
Result Orientation
Operational Efficiency
Fostering Cooperation
Relationship Management
Continuous Improvement
Forward ThinkingEducation
You must have student status and be enrolled at university for the entire duration of the internship. You should preferably be in your final or second to last year of a university course at masterโs level in a technical or scientific discipline.
Additional requirements
The working languages of the Agency are English and French. A good knowledge of one of these is required. Knowledge of another Member State language would be an asset.
Additional Requirements:
- A foundation in NLP techniques, algorithms and tools (e.g summarization, Q/A, semantic search, keyword extraction, NER, etc.)
- Familiarity with NLP libraries and frameworks (e.g NLTK, spaCy, Transformers, GPT, Bert) is a strong asset
- Experience in programming languages commonly used in NLP (e.g Python)
- Experience in using open-source LLM models (e.g. Llama, Falcon, etc)
- Ability to collect, preprocess and analyze textual data
- Experience with version control systems (e.g., Git) is an asset
Other information
For behavioural competencies expected from ESA staff in general, please refer to the ESA Competency Framework.
If you require support with your application due to a disability, please email contact.human.resources@esa.int.
Internships can take place remotely, on-site or partially on-site depending on the pandemic situation, and in line with the relevant Establishmentโs policy (e.g. possible Green Pass requirement) applicable at the time of starting the internship.
Please note that applications are only considered from nationals of one of the following States: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Nationals from Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia, as Associate Member States, or Canada as a Cooperating State, can apply as well as those from Bulgaria, Croatia and Cyprus as European Cooperating States (ECS).