PhD Position in Accountable and Responsible AI

Are you eager to conduct high-impact research spanning computer science, economics, law, and the creative industry—while living in Amsterdam, a dynamic city renowned for its high-quality life and its thriving AI and creative sectors?

Join Us!
A fully funded four-year Ph.D. position is available in the Complex Cyber Infrastructure research group at the University of Amsterdam.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes deeply embedded in our society, the urgency to warrant its responsible and accountable use is increasing. Examples include the control that creative industry actors need to manifest when using AI pipelines in the (moving) image industry.

This PhD project aims to focus on the emerging field of Accountable and Responsible AI, with the goal of advancing knowledge and practice at the intersection of AI research, creative industry practices, and societal regulatory expectations. Two projects underpin this position: SafeGenAI – a creative industry endeavour to enable creative industry actors to safely use GenAI tools; and LLM4LM – a large consortium addressing the legal-tech challenges in cross-organisational multi-domain agentic solutions. The candidate will not only have a chance to contribute to shaping the next generation AI systems within the creative industry and logistics practices, but also potentially to design more transparent, fair, and compliant ones with evolving societal and regulatory expectations.

The successful candidate will be embedded in a team that will help transfer fundamental research results into the creative industry and legal practices, respectively. Moreover, they will be working closely with the supervision team, as well as the other PhD students and postdocs in the research group.

This is what you will do
In this context, you will investigate the following key challenges:

• Opacity in GenAI inferencing: How can the inferencing and reasoning processes of GenAI systems be made sufficiently transparent and traceable to support accountability in high-stakes professional contexts?
• AI legal compliance-by-design: How can GenAI systems be built to satisfy the requirements of the regulations such as the EU AI Act — including transparency, human oversight, and risk management — while remaining practically useful in domain-specific workflows?
• SMEs lack the expertise to navigate complex regulatory environments: How can domain-specific structured knowledge be integrated into GenAI systems to ground their outputs, reduce hallucination, and support trustworthy decision for non-expert users?

What we ask of you
Your experience and profile:

• MSc in CS, AI or a closely related field.
• Strong interest in Interest in finance and financial services is a plus.; previous experience in these fields is a plus.
• Enthusiasm for the research process: studying research papers, solving complex problems, applying creative thinking, evaluation, reflection and disseminating findings via writing and oral presentations.
• The ability to critically analyse abstract models as well as concrete implementations.
• The ability to work individually as well as effectively in a team
• Fluency in written and spoken English

This is what we offer you
A temporary contract for 38 hours per week for the duration of 4 years (the initial contract will be for a period of 18 months and after satisfactory evaluation it will be extended for a total duration of 4 years). The preferred starting date is as soon as possible. This should lead to a dissertation (PhD thesis). We will draft an educational plan that includes attendance of courses and (international) meetings. We also expect you to assist in teaching undergraduates and master students.

The gross monthly salary, based on 38 hours per week and dependent on relevant experience, ranges between € 3,204 to € 4,051 (scale P). This does not include 8% holiday allowance and 8,3% year-end allowance. The UFO profile PhD Candidate is applicable.. A favourable tax agreement, the ‘30% ruling’, may apply to non-Dutch applicants. The Collective Labour Agreement of Universities of the Netherlands is applicable.

We also have an extensive secondary benefits package.

You will work in this team
The Faculty of Science has a student body of around 8,000, as well as 1,800 members of staff working in education, research or support services. Researchers and students at the Faculty of Science are fascinated by every aspect of how the world works, be it elementary particles, the birth of the universe or the functioning of the brain.

The mission of the Informatics Institute (IvI) is to perform curiosity-driven and use-inspired fundamental research in Computer Science. The main research themes are Artificial Intelligence, Computational Science and Systems and Network Engineering. Our research involves complex information systems at large, with a focus on collaborative, data driven, computational and intelligent systems, all with a strong interactive component.

The Complex Cyber Infrastructure (CCI) group is part of the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam. CCI focuses on the complexity of human-made systems on all scales. Cyber Infrastructure is rapidly evolving from relatively simple fixed components to programmable and virtualized objects with many degrees of freedom, owned, operated and governed by different entities in multiple administrative domains interacting on the Internet. Harnessing this complexity in a transparent, trustable way for safe and secure data processing is a major research topic that defines the focus of CCI research. The challenges are addressed by combining methods and results from research into sustainable and sovereign distributed data processing, programmable networks, policy reasoning and normative control, and software (language) engineering.

Want to know more about our organisation? Read more about working at the University of Amsterdam.

If you feel the profile fits you, and you are interested in the job, we look forward to receiving your application. You can apply online via the red button. We accept applications until and including 15 November 2026.
We plan to organise multiple rounds of interviews. Therefore, due to time sensitivity the vacancy will be closed if a suitable candidate is selected before 15 November 2026.

Applications should include the following information (all files besides your cv should be submitted in one single pdf file):

• a detailed CV including the months (not just years) when referring to your education and work experience;
• a letter of motivation;
• a list of publications;
• the names and email addresses of two references who can provide letters of recommendation.

A knowledge security check can be part of the selection procedure.
(for details: national knowledge security guidelines).

Only complete applications received within the response period via the link below will be considered.

If you have any questions or do you require additional information? Please contact:

• Dr. Ana Oprescu, Assistant Professor Complex Cyber Infrastructure, a.m.oprescu@uva.nl