Intern Researcher – Multimodal AI & Interaction

Huawei Canada has an immediate 12 months internship opening for a Researcher.

About the team:

The Huawei Human-Machine Interaction Lab unites global researchers, engineers, and designers to redefine human technology relationships through user centered, hands on research. We focus on agentic AI and multimodal interaction (voice, touch, vision, gesture) across smartphones, wearables, and emerging devices—advancing agentic workflows, multi-agent orchestration, and intuitive human-AI interfaces. By tightly integrating sensing, algorithms, and systems, our prototype driven work ships directly to products, enabling seamless task delegation and human AI collaboration at scale.

About the job

• Rapidly build prototypes that demonstrate new multimodal interactions on real devices, combining modalities such as voice/audio, touch, vision, gesture, motion, and other sensor inputs.
• Integrate existing AI/ML models and tools, such as speech recognition, speech generation, vision models, language models, or multimodal models, into working applications and demos.
• Implement interaction logic that combines information across modalities, for example voice with touch or gesture, visual context with language, or sensor events with intelligent system responses.
• Work with researchers and designers to translate new human-AI interaction concepts into testable prototypes and iterate quickly based on experimental results.
• Use common ML frameworks and tools such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or similar frameworks for model inference, light fine-tuning, experimentation, and evaluation.
• Explore practical trade-offs between on-device and cloud-based AI, including latency, responsiveness, reliability, privacy, and resource constraints.
• Write clean, readable, and maintainable code; debug issues independently and conduct focused tests to evaluate prototype quality and user experience.
• Stay curious about emerging technologies in multimodal AI, foundation models, intelligent agents, and human-machine interaction, and identify opportunities to apply them to new device experiences.

The total targeted annual compensation (based on 2,080 hours per year) ranges from $58,000 to $104,000 depending on education, experience, and demonstrated expertise.

About the ideal candidate

• Currently pursuing a Master’s or PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical/Computer Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Human-Computer Interaction, or a related field.
• Strong programming and software development skills, preferably in Python plus at least one of C++, Java, C#, Kotlin, Swift, or a similar language.
• Solid understanding of data structures and algorithms, including the ability to reason about time/space complexity and select appropriate approaches for practical problems.
• Basic understanding of machine learning and deep learning, with hands-on experience using at least one framework such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX.
• Experience with the basic ML workflow, including loading or training models, running inference, evaluating outputs, and debugging model or data issues.
• Exposure to at least one relevant area such as speech/audio, computer vision, multimodal learning, NLP, HCI, sensor-based interaction, or generative AI.
• Demonstrated ability to independently build technical projects or prototypes and troubleshoot implementation problems.
• Comfortable working in environments such as Linux, Windows, Android, or other device platforms and using development tools, command-line utilities, version control, and dependency management.
• Strong problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills, with genuine interest in building intelligent multimodal experiences.