Are you interested in performing world-class research at the intersection of artificial intelligence, computer vision and video understanding? We are seeking a PhD candidate to tackle the open challenge of automatically understanding actions in videos. Within the fields of computer vision and deep learning, a lot of progress has been made in representing and recognizing concepts in images. However, the world around us is not static, but changes dynamically over time. Actions are well known to be hierarchical in nature. For example, actions can be decomposed into actors, objects, and context [1] or decomposed into action types. Most importantly, actions have hierarchical relations with intentions, which are vital cues for understanding why actions are performed and which actions will be performed in the future. In this PhD position the aim is to uncover such hierarchies and develop corresponding deep network architectures [2].

You are going to carry out research under the supervision of dr. Pascal Mettes at the Intelligent Sensory Information Systems group of the Informatics Institute.

[1] Mettes, Pascal, and Cees G M Snoek. 'Spatial-aware object embeddings for zero-shot localization and classification of actions.' ICCV. 2017.

[2] Mettes, Pascal et al. 'Hyperspherical Prototype Networks.' NeurIPS. 2019.

What are you going to do?

You are expected to:

• invent, evaluate and describe novel algorithms for action understanding;
• pursue, complete, and defend a PhD thesis within the appointed duration of four years;
• present research results at international conferences, workshops, and journals;
• collaborate with other researchers;
• assist in teaching activities such as lab assistance and student supervision.

• A Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics or a closely related field;
• a strong scientific and mathematical background in computer vision, machine learning, and deep learning;
• good programming skills, experience with Python and deep learning toolkits is preferred;
• a good academic record and eagerness to tackle challenging scientific problems;
• fluency in English, both written and spoken.

Fixed-term contract: 18 months.

A temporary contract for 38 hours per week for the duration of 18 months. After a satisfactory evaluation the contract will be extended for 30 months and should lead to a dissertation (PhD thesis). You will get a customized Training and Supervision Plan, that will be evaluated every year.

The salary, depending on relevant experience before the beginning of the employment contract, will be €2,325 to €2,972 (scale P) gross per month, based on fulltime (38 hours a week), exclusive 8 % holiday allowance and 8,3 end-of-year bonus. A favorable tax agreement, the ‘30% ruling’, may apply to non-Dutch applicants. The Collective Labour Agreement of Dutch Universities is applicable.

Are you curious about our extensive package of secondary employment benefits? Then find out more about working at the Faculty of Science.

University of Amsterdam

With over 5,000 employees, 30,000 students and a budget of more than 600 million euros, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is an intellectual hub within the Netherlands. Teaching and research at the UvA are conducted within seven faculties: Humanities, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Economics and Business, Law, Science, Medicine and Dentistry. Housed on four city campuses in or near the heart of Amsterdam, where disciplines come together and interact, the faculties have close links with thousands of researchers and hundreds of institutions at home and abroad.  

The UvA’s students and employees are independent thinkers, competent rebels who dare to question dogmas and aren’t satisfied with easy answers and standard solutions. To work at the UvA is to work in an independent, creative, innovative and international climate characterised by an open atmosphere and a genuine engagement with the city of Amsterdam and society.

Faculty of Science – Informatics Institute

The Faculty of Science has a student body of around 6,500, as well as 1,600 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 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 PhD position is embedded in the Intelligent Sensory Information Systems group, one of the larger groups within the Informatics Institute working on visual recognition and retrieval, headed by prof. dr. Cees Snoek. The group contains many PhD students from diverse backgrounds, working on a variety of scientific problems related to recognizing and retrieving video and images.