PhD student position in Safety Engineering for Trustworthy Autonomy

at  Chalmers

You will be a part of an exciting research environment and acquire the skills to conduct independent research. You will contribute to a future in which we can rely on better learning-enabled autonomous systems that have the potential to improve healthcare, transportation, and other areas of our society.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

We are announcing one PhD position that is placed at the Division for Interaction Design and Software Engineering with Chalmers University of Technology as the employer. Our division provides world-leading research and education in the development of complex and software-intense systems and is characterized by extensive international cooperation as well as close collaboration with the local industry. With approximately 50 researchers including PhD students, PostDocs, and professors, we are one of the largest academic software engineering research groups in the world. Our core expertise is in AI Engineering, software testing, requirements engineering, behavioral software engineering, and software engineering for automotive systems. Being broadly recognized in the academic community, our division has hosted top international conferences such as ICSE, SPLC, ICSA, REFSQ, and EASE during the past recent years.

QUALIFICATIONS

A person meets the general entry requirements for third-cycle studies if he or she:
1. has been awarded a second-cycle qualification
2. has satisfied the requirements for courses comprising at least 240 credits of which at least 60 credits were awarded in the second-cycle, or has acquired substantially equivalent knowledge in some other way in Sweden or abroad.
We strongly welcome candidates who have demonstrated early research potential with evidence such as publications in leading CS conferences within fields such as software engineering (e.g., ICSE, FSE), formal methods (e.g., CAV, TACAS, FM, ATVA), robotics (e.g., ICRA, IROS), AI (e.g., AAAI, IJCAI, ECAI) or machine learning (e.g., ICML, ICLR).

The position comes with enrollment in the PhD program for Computer Science and Engineering, designed for 5 years. As a PhD student, you acquire the skills and knowledge to conduct independent research in the field of software engineering, with a special focus on techniques for enabling dependable AI. You also contribute to the development of knowledge in the subject by writing a scientific dissertation. This includes devoting 80% of your working time to performing research under the supervision of more experienced researchers. Typically, this means carrying out research, writing academic articles, and taking courses to complement your background. The remaining 20% of your working time is devoted to departmental duties, such as helping as teaching assistant in courses offered by the University. Those duties can be concentrated on certain parts of the year depending on the needs of the business in consultation with the students.
Together with the successful applicant, we aim to consider how to combine techniques rooted in first principles (time-to-collision, physics) and symbolic approaches developed in software engineering (e.g., formal verification, testing, synthesis) with the engineering of learning-based software components (e.g., DNN) to ensure that the learning-enabled component will not be the source of harm. In the past, we have developed approaches to formally verify and test autonomous systems, designed specialized loss functions reflecting the safety principles, and developed runtime verification techniques for abnormality detection. The results have been applied in concrete industrial use cases such as autonomous driving, intelligent defect inspection for high-speed trains, and factory automation. As part of the PhD position, you will be able to engage in top-notch research and make a positive impact on society.
Read more about doctoral studies at Chalmers here.