Doctoral researcher in Learning AI Agents University of Luxembourg in Luxembourg

The University of Luxembourg is advertising a Doctoral researcher in Learning AI Agents within the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), one of Europe’s leading research centres for secure, reliable, and trustworthy ICT systems and services. The position is based at the Kirchberg Campus in Luxembourg and is part of the UBIX Research Group led by Prof. Raphaël Frank.

This PhD is embedded in a large industrial research collaboration with a major Luxembourgish energy utility. The project investigates how organisations can keep meaningful control over AI agents that continuously learn from users and evolve in operational settings. The research combines human-AI interaction and AI control/safety: on the interaction side, the student will study when an agent should take initiative, how it should present choices without overwhelming users, and how it can support human judgment rather than replace it. On the control side, the project develops methods for detecting behavioural drift in learning agents, measuring deviation from a validated baseline, and restoring trusted behaviour without losing useful improvements.

The work is strongly interdisciplinary and will involve system building, empirical evaluation with real users in industrial environments, and close collaboration with academic and industry partners. The student is expected to disseminate results through scientific publications and project activities, and to implement proof-of-concept software tools that may be open-sourced where possible.

Ideal profile: MSc degree or equivalent in Computer Science or a related engineering discipline; strong analytical and programming skills (especially Python and C/C++); interest or experience in LLMs and LLM-based agents, human factors, reinforcement learning from human feedback, drift detection, statistical anomaly detection, socio-technical studies, and trustworthy AI governance. Excellent English is required, and knowledge of French, German, or Luxembourgish is an advantage. Applicants must also satisfy doctoral language requirements (B2 level in the thesis language).

Funding and contract: fixed-term doctoral contract for 36 months, full-time (40 hours/week), with a yearly gross salary of EUR 44,531.

Application: submit a CV, degree details, thesis title and summary, publication list, GitHub link if available, cover letter, and university transcript. Apply online via the HR system; email applications are not accepted. Early applications are encouraged because applications are reviewed upon receipt.