Nomination to the ELLIS PhD and Postdoc Program

ELLIS fellows, scholars or unit faculty may nominate PhD students or postdocs who are working with them to become ELLIS PhD students or postdocs in the academic or industry track. Note that postdocs of either track and PhD industry track candidates are currently only recruited via nomination.

Requirements 

In order to become an ELLIS PhD student or postdoc in either track, the following requirements must be fulfilled:

• The candidate: The PhD student/postdoc must have published at least one first-author paper in a top-tier venue in machine-learning driven fields: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, JMLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, IJCV, PAMI, RSS, CoRL, ACL, EMNLP, KDD, AAAI, IJCAI, COLT, UAI, AAMAS, AISTATS, TACL, SIGIR, WSDM, or Web Conference (not including workshops). The ELLIS Board decides on the list of conferences. Suggestions for new conferences or journals are welcome at info@ellis.eu but should be accompanied by arguments why they should be included; new suggestions will be reviewed twice a year. 
• The advisors: 1 ELLIS fellow/scholar + 1 ELLIS fellow/scholar/member*, both based in Europe
  • List of ELLIS fellows/scholars; list of ELLIS members
  • *Co-supervision by two ELLIS members (who are not fellows/scholars) is not possible, unless one of the members belongs to the unit faculty. This entails that: (i) the person is an ELLIS member and belongs to an ELLIS unit; (ii) the person is entitled to supervise PhD students at the respective institution; (iii) the person is appointed by a Unit Director to participate in the central recruiting/nomination process.
  • *Industry Track: in case the industry advisor (secondary advisor) is not an ELLIS member, it is possible for them to join if they have co-authored a paper with the applying student as a result of their collaboration, in a top-tier venue in machine learning or related sub-fields (see list supra).
• Degree (for PhD students): The degree must come from a European institution.
• Activity: Each track has specific exchange or time-sharing requirements (see below). In addition, it is expected that students will publish the results of their research in top-tier venues in machine learning-driven fields. Intellectual Property (IP) that is generated during the research project will be arranged between the host and the exchange institution. The ELLIS Society does not claim any IP.

Additional requirements specific to the academic track:

• International exchange: The PhD student/postdoc must visit an ELLIS fellow/scholar/member (co-supervisor) in another European* country for min. 6 months.
• Location: The two institutions must be located in different European* countries. (*Exception: In the academic track, the co-supervisor can be based outside of Europe, but must in that case be an ELLIS fellow or scholar.)

Additional requirements specific to the industry track:

• Time-sharing: The candidate will spend a minimum of 50% of their time at the academic partner institution and a minimum of 6 months with the industry partner. This can be accumulative (e.g. 2 days per week) or consecutive (e.g. a block similar to an internship). In case there already is an extensive collaboration between an industry and academic partner at one site, e.g. a jointly funded and run industrial-academic lab, slightly different regulations may apply (for more information: phd-industry@ellis.eu).
• Location: The industry partner, industrial research lab, and industry advisor must all be based in Europe (regardless of HQ location), but can otherwise be in the same country/city as the academic partner.

Nomination process

1. ELLIS fellows, scholars or unit faculty may nominate PhD students or postdocs who are working with them to become ELLIS PhD students or postdocs. The nomination can only be approved if the above requirements are fulfilled.

Academic track: send a nomination email to phd@ellis.eu including the following information:

• Name of the PhD/postdoc
• Personal website of the PhD/postdoc
• Email of the PhD/postdoc
• Title of the PhD/postdoc project
• Abstract of the project (5-20 sentences without line break)
• Primary host: advisor name, role, institution, country
• Secondary host or industry partner: advisor name, role, institution/company, country
• Dates: beginning+end of the PhD/postdoc
• Dates: beginning+end of the exchange period/time-sharing agreement
• DOI-link to the first-author publication
• (Optional) Portrait picture of the PhD/postdoc for the website

Industry track: submit the nomination form

2. If all requirements have been met, the PhD student/postdoc will receive a Letter of Intent, to be completed together with their advisors. The Letter of Intent verifies that both partner institutions approve of the arrangement and understand the rules of engagement. 

3. After the signed Letter of Intent is received, the PhD student/postdoc is admitted to the ELLIS PhD & Postdoc Program.