As a PhD candidate, you will conduct independent research on responsible and interpretable advice-giving systems and information retrieval. This research area includes several emerging subfields, including (mechanistic) interpretability for RAG models and IR tasks, the evaluation of explanations in IR, biases in LLM-based IR models, and the relationship between fairness and explainability in these settings. As such, there is substantial room to contribute across a range of topics.
We are looking for an enthusiastic and creative individual who is interested in the following:

• Developing novel techniques to understand how information is processed within deep neural networks.
• Developing methods that achieve high accuracy while also being safe, interpretable, responsible, and reliable.
• Developing evaluation frameworks to assess multiple dimensions of responsible advice-giving systems. Example dimensions include the faithfulness of explanations, biases in generated answers, and usefulness for different types of users.
• Connecting empirical findings about model behavior to theoretical frameworks of computation.
• Critically investigating the potential societal impact of proposed methods.
• Publishing and presenting findings at international AI conferences such as SIGIR, ECIR, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, FAccT, AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, etc.

The exact research topics and work plan will be defined together with the selected candidate. We are open to a variety of directions and look forward to hearing your perspective on what responsible advice-giving should entail.

Your experience and profile:

• MSc in artificial intelligence, computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics, or a related discipline
• Demonstratable background in machine learning, information retrieval or natural language processing
• Excellent software engineering skills in Python
• Fluent in English, both written and spoken

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 € 3,059 to € 3,881 (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 applicants. The Collective Labour Agreement of Universities of the Netherlands  is applicable.

Curious about our extensive secondary benefits package? You can read more about it here.