Multimodal Learning for Defence Internship

About the Program

An NCI Agency internship is between 6 and 10 months located at one of our key hubs in The Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal. Our internship opportunities start from either 1^st March or 1^st September with the start date being dependent on the timeline to secure the required security clearance to work within the NATO community.  During an internship, you will join and support different teams and simultaneously learn from our business experts via on-the-job training and working on purposeful projects or initiatives during your tenure.

About the Internship

Internship duration: 10 months

Location: The Hague, Netherlands

The Chief Technology Office (CTO) is a key enabler of NATO’s digital transformation. This office is a cornerstone for the NCI Agency’s work to advance NATO’s information communications technologies (ICT), which are critical to maintain NATO’s technological edge. With Agency scientists, architects and engineers, the CTO is the Agency’s hub for architecting and designing NATO’s ICT technical landscape while considering innovation, standardization, and coherence across the Alliance.

During this internship you will be a member of the Data Science and AI team of the Chief Technology Office of NCIA. The topic of the internship is to benchmark and to train multimodal models to support NATO capabilities for effective and efficient information distillation from different types of data sources (text, images, remote sensing).

Throughout this internship, we aim for you to go through the complete data-science cycle, culminating in the delivery of a tangible outcome:

• Review the state-of-the-art techniques
• Collaborate with the data science team to identify and collect relevant datasets
• Benchmark existing mulitmodal models and train/finetune them for optimal performance in the relevant usecase (f.e. for retrieval augmented generation)
• Create a proof of concept for the agreed use case and prepare it for production use

About you:

The valuable knowledge and experience that you bring to this role is:

• You are currently studying in a field that is related to data science (such as Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering or Data Science)
• You are looking for a environment where you can work on the state-of-the-art data and machine learning technologies
• You have strong analytical abilities, knowledge of different statistical methods and a familiarity with research studies
• You are familiar with statistical analysis languages and tools like Python
• Experience with Pytorch and cloud deployment is considered a plus

Eligibility Criteria

To be eligible to apply to our internship program, you will need to meet the following criteria:

• You are a national of a NATO member country
• You are currently studying towards a university-level degree or have recently graduated in the past 12 months
• You have strong communication skills in English, both written and oral

We also request that you please attach the following documents to your application form:

• Copy of the university degree you have completed and/or
• Proof of ongoing studies with the dates clearly mentioned if you are still studying

Application Process:

The application process for an internship at the NCI Agency is:

•  Apply via the NCI Agency Careers site by midnight CET 10^th March 2024
• If selected to be progress the first stage evaluation consists of logical and numeracy exercises in addition on a variety of on-demand video questions aligned to the requirements of the internship
• The teams are aiming to virtually interview candidates during the month of March for tentative offer to be presented to successful candidates by early April

Compensation

You will be compensated at a fixed taxable rate of 1,375.09 EUR per month, based on 38 hours of work per week and for travel expenses. 

Thank you for your patience while we consider your application.  

The NCI Agency prides itself on being an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment of mutual respect and value uniqueness and differences in gender, gender identity, race, ethnic or cultural origin, age, religion, sexual orientation and physical or neurocognitive ability.