PhD Position Decentralized and Trustworthy AI Pipelines (EU project WALTZ)

Official university vacancy imported from Delft University of Technology. Details are presented for discovery and may change. Confirm the latest requirements and apply on the official source.

• design decentralized and federated pipelines that combine real and synthetic data across organisational boundaries without a central aggregator, under controlled mixing strategies that address data scarcity and distribution shift;
• make them resilient to Byzantine participants, and to poisoning of the synthetic data supply;
• quantify what leaks: membership inference and reconstruction against models trained on real-synthetic mixes, and the utility cost of differentially private generation;
• treat LLM-based components as a distributed system: replicate inference across diverse models, study how their failures correlate, and use quorum and semantic-agreement mechanisms to turn individually unreliable answers into trustworthy ones;
• build the evaluation side: benchmarks, cross-validation schemes, reporting protocols — covering accuracy, robustness, bias, generalisation and privacy leakage, released as open, reproducible software.
• An MSc (completed, or close to completion) in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Electrical Engineering or a closely related field.
• A solid foundation in machine learning and/or distributed systems. Familiarity with federated or decentralized learning, fault tolerance, generative models, privacy-preserving ML, or LLM-based systems is a strong asset.
• Strong programming skills in Python and hands-on experience with a modern deep learning framework (e.g. PyTorch), including work on Linux-based GPU/HPC clusters.
• Demonstrable interest in trustworthy AI: privacy, robustness, adversarial behaviour, evaluation methodology and reproducibility.
• Strong analytical skills and the independence to carry a research agenda over four years, combined with the discipline to meet project deliverable deadlines.
• Excellent command of written and spoken English. Non-native speakers without an English-taught degree must meet the TU Delft English language requirements (e.g. TOEFL iBT 90 or IELTS 6.5 overall).
• A collaborative attitude: you enjoy working in a large international consortium and can explain your work to non-academic stakeholders such as public administrations.
• Commitment to open science: publishing code and benchmarks, and contributing to open-source software.
• a cover letter (max. 1 page) explaining your motivation and your fit with the research topic;
• your CV, including a list of publications if applicable;
• transcripts of your BSc and MSc studies;
• a copy of your MSc thesis, if applicable;
• proof of English language proficiency, if applicable.
• Optionally, you may add links to code repositories you are proud of.
• You can apply online. We will not process applications sent by email and/or post.
• Please do not contact us for unsolicited services.