Open PhD positions in the Cluster of Excellence “Bilateral AI” at WU Wien (Vienna University of Economics and Business)

We are seeking highly motivated and talented individuals to join our dynamic research team for combining symbolic and sub-symbolic AI. The successful candidates will conduct research at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna) in collaboration with our partner institutes Johannes Kepler University Linz, AAU Klagenfurt, ISTA, TU Graz, and TU Vienna.

The vision of Bilateral AI is to educate a new generation of top-quality AI scientists with a holistic view on symbolic and sub-symbolic AI methods. Training and mentoring of young researchers is a central activity, which combines groundbreaking research work with an education program. The training will be distributed over the six participating institutions.

We are currently inviting applications for two PhD positions (details below). A postdoctoral position will also be announced in the coming weeks—stay tuned!

Position 1 - PhD (pre-doc) position (4 years)

Organizational Unit: Institute for Complex Networks

Principal Investigator: Assoz.Prof PD Dr. Sabrina Kirrane

Research Focus: Given that machine learning (ML) systems are increasingly being applied to and trained on user-generated data, data protection has become a crucial component of trustworthy and ethical ML systems. However, in this context, adhering to data protection principles is particularly challenging, as ML algorithms are often opaque and could potentially infer confidential information during the training process. The proposed PhD project aims to extend both the symbolic and the sub-symbolic state of the art. Potential topics include:

1. investigating how legal and ethical principles be embedded into AI technologies;

2. providing legal and ethical foundations for AI technologies and systems, via policies and norms;

3. extracting information or knowledge from data, which can contain confidential or personal data from users, while ensuring that the protected data itself remains private;

4. extending the state of the art in terms of normative autonomous agents in general and autonomous web agents in particular.
   
   Where to apply: https://www.wu.ac.at/karriere/arbeiten-an-der-wu/jobangebote?yid=2372

 

Position 2 - PhD (pre-doc) position (4 years)

Organizational Units: Institute for Retailing and Data Science; and Institute for Statistics and Mathematics

Principal Investigators: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Nils Wlömert; and Univ.-Prof. Dr. Kurt Hornik

Research Focus: The research for this position focuses on integrating symbolic and sub-symbolic AI methods to enhance interpretability and decision-making in AI systems. Potential topics include:

1. Combining dense vector representations with knowledge graphs for applications such as recommender systems, retail management, and fraud detection, enhancing transparency through structured, symbolic relationships between entities.

2. Applying causal inference with contextual embeddings to assess the impact of marketing actions, providing rule-based, interpretable insights into customer behavior and strategy effectiveness.

3. Creating explainable AI methods to make AI-driven decisions, such as those of recommender systems and targeting algorithms, more transparent and understandable for consumers.

4. Developing novel methods for causal inference with text-based treatments, leveraging natural language processing and causal representation learning techniques. Applications will focus on impact evaluation in recommender systems and retail management, providing insights into how textual content influences consumer behavior.
   
   Where to apply: https://www.wu.ac.at/karriere/arbeiten-an-der-wu/jobangebote?yid=2361