PhD Research Fellow in ICT: Multimodal Agentic AI for Virtual Coaching Assistant
A 100 % position is available at the University of Agder, Faculty of Engineering and Science as a PhD Research Fellow in ICT, affiliated to the Department of Information and Communication Technology at, for a period of three years, or four years with 25% other career-promoting work. The position is located at Campus Grimstad. But, the candidate is expected to spend substantial time collaborating with project partners, particularly Initial Force in Trondheim, Norway.
This PhD position is directly linked to an ongoing Research Council of Norway Innovation Project, Virtual Coaching Assistant: Towards a Sustainable Coaching Industry, where UiA is a core research partner. The candidate is expected to contribute toward answering key research questions related to development of personalized AI agents and their interactions. The position is embedded in the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR) and will contribute to cutting-edge research at the intersection of AI, multimodal data, and real-world deployment within sports and health science. The project will be conducted in close collaboration with industry and research partners, including Initial Force AS and NTNU, and will involve applied research in realistic, data-intensive environments.
The research will combine theoretical understanding, methodological development, and practical experimentation, contributing both scientific publications and reusable evaluation frameworks.
Key research activities include:
- Designing and implementing benchmarking pipelines for multimodal agentic AI systems, focusing on robustness, reliability, and trustworthiness.
- Developing evaluation methodologies that combine quantitative metrics with qualitative expert assessment.
- Investigating model behavior, failure modes, and uncertainty in AI systems operating on complex, heterogeneous data.
- Contributing to open, reproducible research practices within CAIR.
