The proliferation of Internet-connected and sensor-enabled technologies, including autonomous vehicles, wearables, smartphones, and other IoT devices, has resulted in distributed systems that generate vast quantities of data with a high velocity and volume. This abundance of data presents compelling opportunities for deep learning to solve a diverse array of complex tasks and challenges. The emerging field of federated learning investigates methods to leverage the wealth of data distributed across heterogeneous edge devices to collaboratively train models at scale. Though, there remain open research challenges regarding ensuring data privacy, non-stationary distributions, concept drift, scaling algorithms to large numbers of resource-constrained devices, and practical deployment considerations given real-world requirements.

To this end, we seek an excellent and highly motivated candidate for a Ph.D. position in the area of federated learning with a focus on developing data-centric approaches. The research topics include, but are not restricted to: dealing with multimodality, handling unlabelled data, incorporating human agency, ensuring fairness, adaptive personalization, robustness, and enhancing user-system interplay. For instance, a potential application area for federated learning is in personal health sensing using wearable devices. The digital devices, such as fitness trackers, smart watches, and other biosensors can continuously capture physiological signals like heart rate, activity levels, sleep, and more. They generate substantial amounts of data on a daily basis for each individual user. Federated learning techniques could enable collaborative training of deep learning models on most relevant data across users without compromising privacy.

This Ph.D. position provides the opportunity to advance the frontier of federated learning and distributed sensing systems. The candidate will be supervised by senior researchers and design experts in the Department of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology and will contribute to its vibrant research community with connections to interesting lines of research in health, mobility and sustainability.