PhD Research Fellowship in Safety and Security Evaluation of Deployed AI Systems

A 3-year PhD Research Fellowship is available at Simula Metropolitan Center for Digital Engineering (SimulaMet), within our research effort on the security and safety of AI systems.

Most security and safety work on AI happens where models are built. We work where they are used. As AI systems move into hospitals, public administration, and other consequential settings, the institutions that deploy them, and the regulators and auditors who oversee them, need to establish whether a given system is safe to use, independently of the vendor that built it.

The PhD researcher will develop methods and tools for evaluating, red-teaming, and monitoring AI systems as they are actually deployed, large language models today, and increasingly agentic and multimodal systems.

The work pursues two goals at once:

• A science of failure: Not counting failures, but explaining why and when systems fail, so that findings generalise beyond the single system tested.
• Open, vendor-independent tools: Practical, local-first instruments that any regulator, auditor, hospital, or public agency can run without commercial dependencies.

The purpose of a PhD fellowship is to qualify the candidate for work in positions that require a high level of scientific competence, leading to the award of a doctoral degree (PhD). The successful candidate will be admitted to a doctoral (PhD) programme at OsloMet - Oslo Metropolitan University.