3-year PhD Position (E13 100%) on Lightweight Language Models and Agentic AI in the DFG Project *SocEnRep* at Ulm University, Germany

[Ansgar Scherp]

Dear all,

I am seeking a highly motivated PhD student to pursue her or his career in Data Science, with a focus on lightweight language models and agentic AI. ✨

Motivation    Data Science deals with the content-driven identification and localization of digital objects such as semi-structured data on the web (e.g., Linked Open Data), documents, profiles, or communities — and with understanding the relationships among them. This includes designing innovative methodologies and algorithms as well as applying them to large and diverse data and document corpora. The work is inherently interdisciplinary and involves collaboration with fields such as the social sciences and economics.

About Us    Ulm University (UULM) is a research university with an excellent reputation for interdisciplinary research, innovation, and education. It plays a central role in the Science City of Ulm — the region’s largest educational institution and a strong driver of R&D through its partnerships with non-university research institutes, maximum-care hospitals, and technology companies. UULM is ranked among the world’s top 200 universities in the Times Higher Education Ranking. 🌍

The city of Ulm was ranked Germany’s most livable and future-ready city in 2024. Located in the southeast on the Danube River, its roughly 130,000 residents enjoy a vibrant cultural heritage and beautiful natural surroundings. 🌿

About the Position    The Data Science and Big Data Analytics research group, led by Prof. Scherp, was established in 2020. It is a computer science group with a strong reputation in text and data mining — particularly deep learning methods on text, graph representation learning, and knowledge graphs. We have long-standing experience in Data Science and in interdisciplinary collaborations with researchers from, e.g., the social sciences and economics.

In the DFG-funded project SocEnRep, we aim to develop lightweight language models and agentic AI approaches. These models will be applied to improve the reproducibility of research in economics and the social sciences. To this end, we analyze both research code and corresponding papers, and we match code executions with the results reported in publications.

For the DFG-funded project SocEnRep, we seek:

1 Doctoral Researcher (PhD student, E13 100%)

The position is available immediately and is limited to 36 months in accordance with the German WissZeitVG (Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz).

Your Tasks
- Conduct research on lightweight language models and on developing and applying agentic AI approaches
- Run experiments on large datasets following rigorous scientific procedures
- Apply developed methods to improve scientific reproducibility by matching research papers with results from code re-executions 🔍

Requirements
- Strong interest in conducting research and writing scientific papers
- Very good problem-solving and programming skills
- Master of Science in Computer Science

Interested?    Apply via email before December 5th. Please include a motivation letter, CV, transcript of records, degree certificates, and any supporting materials such as letters of reference. Screening starts immediately.

We look forward to receiving your application.
For questions about the position, please contact Prof. Dr. Ansgar Scherp (ansgar...@uni-ulm.de).