Telefonica Alpha
Alpha is Telefonica’s
Moonshots facility, based in Barcelona. At Alpha, we bring together the
very best minds in the world in order to tackle the world’s greatest
challenges, and create solutions that are truly unique.
Alpha Health
Worldwide,
healthcare costs have been increasing faster than GDP for 50 years,
whilst key indicators such as life expectancy have plateaued in many
countries. The root cause is a change in disease burden – across the
world, today’s biggest diseases and biggest killers are chronic diseases
such as cancer, heart attack, stroke, and mental health disorders. In fact, for every life saved from infections since 2000, we’ve lost two lives to chronic disease.
However,
it’s now well-established that the main cause of chronic diseases is
everyday behaviours such as poor diet, lack of exercise, using tobacco,
excessive alcohol, or lack of sleep. In 2008 the official leading
cause of death in the US became personal choices; yet healthcare systems
today are simply not designed to help people change these root causes
of chronic disease. To make tackling everyday behaviours even
harder, pioneers in neuroscience and behavioural economics have begun to
reveal that people are not even really in conscious control of their
behaviour. We’re learning that attention is such a scarce resource that
we make many decisions – big and small – using automatic (and
unconscious) processes. It appears that the best way to tackle
chronic disease is to help people optimise their happiness – using the
basic drive for happiness to steer everyday behaviours.
At
Alpha, we believe that advances in neuroscience, mobile computing, and
machine learning now mean we can help people to take control of their
own behaviour, optimise their life, and limit the effects of unhealthy
behaviour on their bodies and their minds.
We believe that doing
this will help people to manage and prevent a range of chronic diseases
and help make personal changes that will improve their satisfaction
with their life. To achieve this, we are using cutting-edge digital
insights and the smart, real-time interpretation of data to develop
targeted tools, built around each user.
Of course, we recognize
the myriad challenges involved in this work. We are working
systematically with our team of diverse minds in science, engineering
and design to build breakthrough solutions to meet these challenges
head-on. To support our work, we are partnering with the best
academics, developers, companies, and professionals around the world.
Our
offices are in an iconic building located right by the Mediterranean
Sea and close to the vibrant innovation and start-up business area of
Barcelona.
Our current research roles
Alpha
Health Research is an interdisciplinary lab that enthusiastically
encourages mixing different scientific domains. Our team includes
experts with very different cultural and professional backgrounds. We
collaborate with world leading psychologists, neuroscientists,
psychiatrists and behavioural economists. Our mission is to harness
unprecedented data sources, machine learning advancements, new knowledge
about brain and human behaviour, and to bring concrete value to people
helping them living happier and healthier lives. We discover new
scientific knowledge but we are also driven to apply our research in
practice, i.e., to bring actionable information from data and scientific
knowledge to health products that measurably improve lives of millions.
We are currently growing ans as part of this we are looking to hire TWO people on the following jobs:
1. Machine Learning / Recommendation System Researcher
- Extensive awareness and understanding of the State of the Art in Recommendation Systems
- Hands-on experience in building recommendation systems
- Strong
background in machine learning with domain knowledge and experience in
the following areas: recommendation systems, information retrieval,
data-driven statistical modeling, feature extraction and analysis
- Solid knowledge of scripting in Python and/or R, knowledge of other programming languages is an advantage
- Strong desire to transfer your ideas into reality
- Publications at top-tier conferences or journals
- Excellent
critical thinking skills, combined with the ability to present your
ideas clearly and compellingly in both verbal and written form
- Interest and/or experience in human behaviour analysis, psychology, or computational neuroscience is nice to have
2. Research Engineer
- Expert knowledge of Python and of programming languages such as C++/Java
- Expert knowledge in data management and data flow engineering with both structured and unstructured data
- Excellent track record of translating ideas into prototypes quickly
- 5+ years of relevant experience in industry and/or academia
- Data-driven analysis and understanding of statistics
- Solid fundamentals in algorithms, math, and machine learning
- Understanding of large scale systems monitoring and system architectures
- Ability to effectively communicate the results of data analysis