Postdoc Position on Multimedia Analysis

Organisation/Company Utrecht University Research Field Communication sciences » Journalism Computer science » Informatics Researcher Profile Recognised Researcher (R2) Final date to receive applications 15 Sep 2026 - 21:59 (UTC) Country Netherlands Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Not Applicable Hours Per Week 40.0 Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme? Not funded by a EU programme Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure?

No

Are you passionate about developing cutting-edge AI techniques to enhance interaction and communication across multiple modalities, such as text, pictures, audio, and video? Join the large scale HAICu project to help unlock the potential of cultural digital archives through multimodal use, providing richer context and a more comprehensive analysis of current complex issues in society. If this fits your expertise and interests, the Interaction Division of Utrecht University is seeking you!

Your job

We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher to work within the multi-partner HAICu NWA-ORC project. This project is implemented by an ambitious consortium including many universities, knowledge institutions, archives, foundations, cultural institutions and business partners in the Netherlands. It aims to use improved access to digital heritage to tutor the Digital Citizen in the use of big data. It brings together AI researchers and Digital Humanities scholars to seek solutions to the problem of inadequate data-mining tools we have, aiming to derive information from the continuous stream of data about the present and the past.

This will help citizens and other regular users, heritage curators and journalists who are interested in tapping heritage collections, as well as civic organizations and authorities interested in improving civic participation.

The research in this postdoctoral position focuses on text and image feature learning for news ecosystems, analysing the complex multidimensional feature space of visual information to support data-driven journalism. This includes experiments for accountability, transparency, inclusiveness, and misinformation. The key technology is multimodal deep learning, and its extensions for these additional targets. In particular, we have a large collection of newspaper articles dealing with migration-related topics, and we are investigating how text and image analysis can provide insights into such a corpus.

Research will include testing, validation and evaluation on large scale and interoperable collections, in cooperation with the societal partners in the project, including the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the National Archive, and the National Library of the Netherlands. The research will take place in collaboration with the HAICu fieldlab ‘Deep Journalism’, which develops functionality for searching for items about a similar topic from different archives and with various modalities to support news journalists.

As a postdoc in this project, you will conduct research in close collaboration with a multidisciplinary research team. This position offers you the opportunity to further develop your academic skills and contribute to groundbreaking research. Next to that it provides a unique opportunity to network with an extensive scientific and cultural network of people in the Netherlands, and to seek answers to societal problems jointly with a great team of top scholars.

We are looking for a talented postdoc candidate, with a keen interest in academic and professional development, who meets the following requirements:

• a PhD degree in computer science or artificial intelligence;
• demonstrable machine learning skills;
• curiosity about societal issues and how AI can be employed for the benefit of the public;
• strong teamwork skills, as collaboration with other researchers and stakeholders is key to the project’s success;
• comfortable in doing multidisciplinary research and interacting with important stakeholders and eager to conduct innovative and thorough research;
• fluency in written and spoken English.

• a position for 18 months (0.8
  -1.0 FTE);
• a…