项目介绍

2026年2月4日

Progress in multimodal world models has been astonishing in the past few years and allow to equip robots with world knowledge of scenes, objects, and human activities. Robots should then be able to perceive and act upon the sensed world, be it that current solutions require data diversity, task circumstances, and the label vocabulary all to be pre-defined, stationary and controlled. As soon as these ‘closed world’ deep learning assumptions are broken, perceptual understanding suffers and oftentimes catastrophically. Hence, robots equipped with state-of-the-art multimodal perceptual skills will experience great difficulty generalizing to perception tasks in an open world where sensory and semantic conditions will differ considerably from those perceived during training. Our key research question is: How to enable multimodal perception for robots that is robust to sensory and semantic shifts between training and operation conditions?

A good salary

Your salary will be determined on the basis of your experience and seniority, in accordance with the Labour agreement. Your grading and therefore the amounts mentioned are based on full employment of 38 hours per week. Read more

232 vacation hours

We also offer parental leave, partner leave and social engagement leave. Through the Employment Conditions Menu Card, there are opportunities for even more vacation hours.Read more

Financial arrangements

On top of your salary, you receive holiday allowance (8%) and a year-end bonus (8.3%). You build up a good pension with ABP. And in addition, we offer many other allowances and schemes.Read more

Career development and room for growth

The UvA encourages you to continue to professionalise through training courses and open UvA lectures.Read more

Family matters

Relocating to the Netherlands with your family? Find out about daycare, schooling, health insurance or employment options and support for your partner or spouse. Including the IDCN-network which provides support for your spouse through various training sessions, social activities, and networking events. Read more

A good salary

Your salary will be determined on the basis of your experience and seniority, in accordance with the Labour agreement. Your grading and therefore the amounts mentioned are based on full employment of 38 hours per week. Read more

232 vacation hours

We also offer parental leave, partner leave and social engagement leave. Through the Employment Conditions Menu Card, there are opportunities for even more vacation hours.Read more

Financial arrangements

On top of your salary, you receive holiday allowance (8%) and a year-end bonus (8.3%). You build up a good pension with ABP. And in addition, we offer many other allowances and schemes.Read more

Career development and room for growth

The UvA encourages you to continue to professionalise through training courses and open UvA lectures.Read more

Family matters

Relocating to the Netherlands with your family? Find out about daycare, schooling, health insurance or employment options and support for your partner or spouse. Including the IDCN-network which provides support for your spouse through various training sessions, social activities, and networking events. Read more

A good salary

Your salary will be determined on the basis of your experience and seniority, in accordance with the Labour agreement. Your grading and therefore the amounts mentioned are based on full employment of 38 hours per week. Read more

232 vacation hours

We also offer parental leave, partner leave and social engagement leave. Through the Employment Conditions Menu Card, there are opportunities for even more vacation hours.Read mor

Financial arrangements

On top of your salary, you receive holiday allowance (8%) and a year-end bonus (8.3%). You build up a good pension with ABP. And in addition, we offer many other allowances and schemes.Read more

Career development and room for growth

The UvA encourages you to continue to professionalise through training courses and open UvA lectures.Read more

Family matters

Relocating to the Netherlands with your family? Find out about daycare, schooling, health insurance or employment options and support for your partner or spouse. Including the IDCN-network which provides support for your spouse through various training sessions, social activities, and networking events. Read more

All about this vacancy

This is what you will do

You will carry out research and development in the areas of embodied world models, deep machine learning and computer vision. Potential topics of interest are test-time generalization, embodied grounding, data scarcity and uncertainly modeling. The research is embedded in the VIS lab at the University of Amsterdam, and you will actively collaborate within the OpenBots lab, that contains a PhD and Postdoc at the University of Amsterdam and three PhD students at Delft University of Technology (focusing on robot planning and control). The lab is further supported by researchers and robots from project partners TNO and the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee. The project is carried out with supervisors from the Video and Image Sense Lab (Amsterdam) and the Cognitive Robotics Group (Delft). The team at UvA will be supervised by prof. dr. Cees Snoek and dr. ir. Gertjan Burghouts (TNO).

Your tasks will be to:

• Develop new deep learning, computer vision and multimodal learning methods on embodied world models.
• Actively collaborate within the OpenBots Lab and contribute to its demonstrators.
• Regularly present internally on your progress.
• Regularly present intermediate research at international conferences and workshops, publish them in proceedings and journals.
• Assist in teaching activities such as lab assistance and student supervision. 
• Complete and defend a PhD thesis within the official appointment duration of four years.

What we ask of you

• An MSc degree in Artificial Intelligence, (Applied) Mathematics/Physics, Computer Science, Engineering or related field.
• A strong background/knowledge in machine learning and computer vision, knowledge of robotics is a plus but not required.
• Solid mathematics foundations, especially statistics, calculus and linear algebra;
• Excellent programming skills, preferably in Python.
• You are highly motivated, independent, and creative.
• Strong communication, presentation and writing skills and excellent command of English.
• Prior publications in relevant machine learning or computer vision conferences or journals are advantageous.

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 € 3,059 to € 3,881 (scale P). This does not include 8% holiday allowance and 8,3% year-end allowance. The UFO profile Promovendus is applicable. For this position we can not sponsor a visa. The Collective Labour Agreement of Universities of the Netherlands is applicable.

Curious about our extensive secondary benefits package? You can read more about it here.