PhD Position in Accountable and AI

A fully funded four-year Ph.D. position is available in the Complex Cyber Infrastructure research group at the University of Amsterdam.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes deeply embedded in our society, the urgency to warrant its responsible and accountable use is increasing. Examples include the control that creative industry actors need to manifest when using AI pipelines in the (moving) image industry.

This PhD project aims to focus on the emerging field of Accountable and Responsible AI, with the goal of advancing knowledge and practice at the intersection of AI research, creative industry practices, and societal regulatory expectations. Two projects underpin this position:
SafeGenAI - a creative industry endeavour to enable creative industry actors to safely use GenAI tools; and LLM4LM - a large consortium addressing the legal-tech challenges in cross-organisational multi-domain agentic solutions. The candidate will not only have a chance to contribute to shaping the next generation AI systems within the creative industry and logistics practices, but also potentially to design more transparent, fair, and compliant ones with evolving societal and regulatory expectations.

The successful candidate will be embedded in a team that will help transfer fundamental research results into the creative industry and legal practices, respectively. Moreover, they will be working closely with the supervision team, as well as the other PhD students and postdocs in the research group.

In this context, you will investigate the following key challenges:

• Opacity in GenAI inferencing:
  How can the inferencing and reasoning processes of GenAI systems be made sufficiently transparent and traceable to support accountability in high-stakes professional contexts?
• AI legal compliance-by-design:
  How can GenAI systems be built to satisfy the requirements of the regulations such as the EU AI Act - including transparency, human oversight, and risk management - while remaining practically useful in domain-specific workflows?
• SMEs lack the expertise to navigate complex regulatory environments:
  How can domain-specific structured knowledge be integrated into GenAI systems to ground their outputs, reduce hallucination, and support trustworthy decision for non-expert users?

Your experience and profile:

• MSc in CS, AI or a closely related field.
• Strong interest in Interest in finance and financial services is a plus.; previous experience in these fields is a plus.
• Enthusiasm for the research process: studying research papers, solving complex problems, applying creative thinking, evaluation, reflection and disseminating findings via writing and oral presentations.
• The ability to critically analyse abstract models as well as concrete implementations.
• The ability to work individually as well as effectively in a team
• Fluency in written and spoken English

A temporary contract for 38 hours per week for the duration of 4 years (the initial contract will be for a period of 18 months and after satisfactory evaluation it will be extended for a total duration of 4 years). The preferred starting date is as soon as possible. This should lead to a dissertation (PhD thesis). We will draft an educational plan that includes attendance of courses and (international) meetings.

We also expect you to assist in teaching undergraduates and master students.

The gross monthly salary, based on 38 hours per week and dependent on relevant experience, ranges between € 3,204 to € 4,051 (scale P). This does not include 8% holiday allowance and 8,3% year-end allowance. The UFO profile PhD Candidate is applicable.. A favourable tax agreement, the ‘30% ruling’, may apply to non-Dutch…