Postdoc Position on Embodied World Models

University of Amsterdam • Full-time • Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands • €3.55k - €5.54k / month • 3w ago

Join us!

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?

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 student 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:

Conducting independent research in AI, resulting in academic publications in peer-reviewed conferences and journals;
To become an active member of the research community and to collaborate with other researchers and PhD students,
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.
Supervising Bachelor and Master theses and tutoring students.

What we ask of you

PhD in artificial intelligence or computer science;
Committed researcher, demonstrated by publications in international refereed academic conferences, or journals, in particular in computer vision (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV) and machine learning (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML).
Experience in supporting tasks and the willingness to take the responsibility for administrative tasks,
Strong communication, presentation and writing skills and excellent command of English

This is what we offer you

We offer a temporary employment contract for 38 hours per week for a period of 2 years. Initial employment is 12 months and after satisfactory performance and a positive evaluation at the end of the first year, the appointment will be extended further with 12 months. The preferred starting date is as soon as possible.

The gross monthly salary, based on 38 hours per week and dependent on relevant experience, ranges between € 3,546 to € 5,538 (scale 10) This does not include 8% holiday allowance and 8,3% year-end allowance. The UFO profile Researcher 4 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.

You will work in this team

The Faculty of Science (FNWI) has a student body of around 8,000, as well as 1,800 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 position is with Prof. dr. Cees Snoek, Professor, head of the Video & Image Sense lab (VIS lab), at the University of Amsterdam. VIS lab is a world-leading lab on Computer Vision and Machine Learning, and has over 40 PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and faculty members working on a broad variety of deep learning, computer vision, and foundation model subjects, like self-supervised learning, diffusion models, and test-time generalization for perception tasks like object detection, instance segmentation and activity recognition. The position is also embedded in the ELLIS Network of Excellence in AI.

Are you interested in performing high-impact artificial intelligence research on embodied world models that will enable an autonomous robot to operate in an open world?

Join us!

This is what you will do

Your tasks will be to:

Conducting independent research in AI, resulting in academic publications in peer-reviewed conferences and journals;
To become an active member of the research community and to collaborate with other researchers and PhD students,
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.
Supervising Bachelor and Master theses and tutoring students.

What we ask of you

PhD in artificial intelligence or computer science;
Committed researcher, demonstrated by publications in international refereed academic conferences, or journals, in particular in computer vision (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV) and machine learning (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML).
Experience in supporting tasks and the willingness to take the responsibility for administrative tasks,
Strong communication, presentation and writing skills and excellent command of English

This is what we offer you

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

You will work in this team

If you feel the profile fits you, and you are interested in the job, we look forward to receiving your application. You can apply online via the button below. We accept applications until and including March 13, 2026.

Applications should include the following information (all files besides your cv should be submitted in one single pdf file):

A letter that motivates your choice for this position;
Curriculum vitae, including your list of publications ;
A link to your PhD thesis – if online available, else include an abstract.
A complete record of Bachelor and Master courses (including grades and explanation of grading system);
The names and contact addresses of at least two academic references (please do not include any recommendation letters).

Note that because our OpenBots partners TNO and the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee handle sensitive information, a security investigation will be part of the application procedure. Applicants residing outside NATO countries will not be considered.

If you have any questions or do you require additional information? Please contact:

Prof. dr. Cees Snoek, c.g.m.snoek@uva.nl
Dr. ir. Gertjan Burghouts, gertjan.burghouts@tno.nl

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