2 fully-funded PhD Positions at Table Representation Learning Lab in Amsterdam
Available are 2 fully-funded PhD positions open in the recently established Table Representation Learning Lab in Amsterdam (https://trl-lab.github.io/people/), led by dr. Madelon Hulsebos.
The PhD positions are contributing to the democratization of insights from tabular data, and will do research in the direction of:
PhD on Fundamental Techniques for Table Representation Learning:
High-capacity neural models, such as transformers, have been pivotal for establishing general-purpose models for a wide variety of natural language tasks. Despite successful adaptations for structured data, our research has identified shortcomings for fundemental properties of tabular data. This research will focus on exploring fundamental techniques for tabular-native models. This can involve, for example, studying new model architectures, serialization methods, and tokenization techniques, among others. A strong interest and background in AI and NLP are desired.PhD on Reliable Mechanisms for AI-Powered Data Analysis:
Tabular data analysis is an emerging specialization of AI-powered systems in the form of, for example, agentic systems or other abstract LLM-pipelines, but research has shown that existing AI-powered data analysis frameworks are brittle. If successful, though, such systems can uncover high-value insights from structured data that prevails in governments, humanitarian organizations, enterprises, and healthcare. The anticipated research will focus on developing mechanisms for reliable (reliable in a broad sense) AI-powered data analysis systems. This can involve research questions from NLP and AI like model robustness and guardrails, human-computer interaction such as interpretability and interfaces, and ethics and regulation, but also be focused on applications such as data preparation, etc.
The PhD students will be based in the TRL Lab at CWI and co-advised with professors from the University of Amsterdam (which grants the PhD degree). Both are fully funded 4-year positions with a gross monthly salary that increases from €2,968 in year 1 up to €3,801. You will receive an extra holiday allowance (8%) and year-end bonus (8.233%), as well as 42 vacation days.
More about the working conditions at: https://www.cwi.nl/jobs/terms-of-employment.
