School of Design
Postdoctoral Fellow / Research Associate / Research Assistant (Full-time/Part-time) (several posts)
(Ref. 260810001)
[Appointment period: each for one to six months]
Duties
The appointees will assist the project leader in the research project – “Emotion-aware environmental intelligence: Optimizing the affective-comfort-energy nexus for ESG-integrated building management”. They will be required to:
(a) assist in research and development related to emotion-aware environmental intelligence and ESG-integrated building management systems;
(b) support research on occupants’ affective experience, environmental comfort, behavioural responses, energy use and human-AI interaction in intelligent built environments;
(c) conduct literature reviews, user research, interviews, surveys, experiments and other empirical studies;
(d) collect, process and analyse qualitative and quantitative data related to user emotion, perception comfort, interaction, environmental conditions and energy-related behaviours;
(e) develop research concepts, interactive prototypes, system demonstrations and presentation materials for smart and human-centred building environments;
(f) support programming, technical development and prototyping of Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT)-enabled, emotion-aware or intelligent environmental management systems;
(g) assist in the preparation of research papers, reports, presentations and other project outputs; and
(h) perform any other duties as assigned by the project leader or his delegates.
Qualifications
Applicants for the Postdoctoral Fellow post should have a doctoral degree in Computer Science [e.g. computer science, artificial intelligence, software engineering, human-computer interaction (HCI), data science or a related discipline], Design (e.g. interaction design, user experience design, service design, product design, industrial design or a related discipline) or other relevant interdisciplinary disciplines (e.g. building services engineering, environmental engineering, energy engineering, smart city studies, sustainability, information systems or a related discipline) and must have no more than five years of post-qualification experience at the time of application.
Applicants for the Research Associate post should have a master’s degree in the above-mentioned disciplines or a good honours degree with three or more years of research/relevant work experience.
Applicants for the Research Assistant post should have an honours degree in the above-mentioned disciplines or an equivalent qualification.
Applicants should also have expertise in design, HCI, artificial intelligence, AIoT, smart buildings, environmental intelligence, energy management, sustainability or related domains.
Preference will be given to those with:
(a) experience in human-centred design, HCI research, smart buildings, environmental intelligence, sustainability, energy management, or interdisciplinary research projects;
(b) experience in qualitative and quantitative research methods, including interviews, surveys usability testing, field studies and experimental studies;
(c) knowledge of user-centred design, affective computing, emotion-aware interaction, human-AI interaction, environmental comfort, occupant behaviour, or ESG-related building management;
(d) programming skills, preferably in Python, JavaScript, C/C++ or related languages;
(e) hands-on experience in AI model development, fine-tuning, evaluation, data pre-processing and deployment for interactive, AIoT-enabled or intelligent environmental systems;
(f) familiarity with sensor data, environmental monitoring, building management systems, energy data or wearable/physiological data;
(g) good communication skills in English; and
(h) a sense of responsibility, self-motivation and ability to work well in a team.
Applicants are invited to contact Prof. Stephen J. Wang via email at stephen.j.wang@polyu.edu.hk for further information.
Conditions of Service
For full-time appointments, a highly competitive remuneration package will be offered.
For part-time appointments, the remuneration rates are HK$385 per hour for the post of Postdoctoral Fellow, HK$181 per hour for the post of Research Associate and HK$125 per hour for the post of Research Assistant.
Consideration of applications will commence on 17 August 2026 until the positions are filled.
Posting date: 10 August 2026