CS Top-Conference PhD Recruitment Roundup — Week of June 8, 2026
One new qualifying position this week — INRIA Sophia Antipolis (Giovanni Neglia & Chuan Xu, federated learning & privacy attacks, deadline June 21, €2,300/month). Deadline update: University of Vienna (Tschiatschek) extended from June 6 to June 16 — applicants who missed the first window now have 8 days. Chalmers Earth Observation AI listing closed without public notice. Full 6-position deadline reminder table covering all active positions through June 21.
June 8, 2026 · 11:26 PM
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Coverage window: June 1–8, 2026. One new position cleared the top-venue bar this week. A previously listed position (University of Vienna) received a 10-day deadline extension — applicants who missed the June 6 cutoff now have until June 16. One earlier position (Chalmers University, Earth Observation AI) was quietly closed before its stated deadline; no supervisor was ever publicly named.
Scan coverage this week: jobs.inria.fr, academicpositions.com, phdscanner.com (partial — SPA rendering), jobbnorge.no, meo-lab.com, Ellis.eu, Nature Careers. Deadline re-verification was completed for all six positions tracked from prior issues. Estimated new-position recall: ~40%. Structural gaps persist in US positions, NLP/LLM-specific paths, and RL/robotics.
New this week — federated learning & privacy
PhD in distributed ML with malicious clients — INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France
Deadline: June 21, 2026
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Advisors: Dr. Giovanni Neglia (INRIA NEO Team, Université Côte d'Azur) and Dr. Chuan Xu (INRIA Sophia Antipolis), with an industry co-supervisor, Dr. Igor Carrara of Hivenet/Antimatter (Cannes). 1
Research direction: Privacy vulnerabilities in federated and distributed training systems. The PhD covers three objectives in sequence: advancing privacy attacks capable of extracting richer private information beyond class-level representations; studying stealthy model-poisoning attacks under bounded threat models where the adversary must keep updates small enough to evade detection; and designing defenses that combine robust aggregation, anomaly detection, and privacy-preserving training. The work combines theoretical analysis with simulation experiments. 1
The central question the PhD sets out to answer:
"How much private information can a malicious participant extract while keeping its poisoned update sufficiently small or stealthy to avoid detection?" 1
Advisor's recent top-venue record: Neglia published at NeurIPS 2022 ("FLamby: Datasets and Benchmarks for Cross-Silo Federated Learning in Realistic Healthcare Settings") and NeurIPS 2025 ("Streaming Federated Learning with Markovian Data"). 2 Chuan Xu's DBLP record shows publications at top ML venues with a focus on federated and distributed optimization. 3
About INRIA: INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique) is the French national research institute for digital science and technology, with approximately 2,600 employees across 200 project teams. The NEO Team at Sophia Antipolis focuses on network engineering, optimization, distributed systems, and federated learning. Sophia Antipolis is one of Europe's largest technology parks, located on the French Riviera between Nice and Cannes.
Security note: The position is located in a restricted area (Zone à Régime Restrictif — ZRR), which may require French national security clearance. Applicants who are not French nationals should clarify eligibility before applying. 1
| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Position type | PhD (3-year fixed-term contract, 36 months) |
| Institution | INRIA NEO Team, Université Côte d'Azur, Sophia Antipolis |
| Location | Sophia Antipolis, France |
| Stipend | €2,300/month gross |
| Benefits | Subsidized meals, partial public transport reimbursement, 7 weeks annual leave + 10 RTT days, teleworking option |
| Requirements | Master's in CS, ML, Mathematics, or related; background in distributed systems, federated learning, or privacy/security preferred |
| Start date | October 1, 2026 |
| Application deadline | June 21, 2026 |
| Application link | INRIA portal — offer 2026-10076 |
| Security note | ZRR area; possible French national security clearance required |
Expired this cycle — CopeNLU, University of Copenhagen (LLM interpretability)
The week's most substantive discovery did not make it into the active listings: two positions at the CopeNLU lab (University of Copenhagen) — one PhD and one postdoc — closed on May 31, 2026, before this scan cycle opened. Both are listed here for awareness.
Advisors: Prof. Isabelle Augenstein (Full Professor, DIKU; Google Scholar citations 11,000+; ACL 2025 4) and Prof. Pepa Atanasova (Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, DIKU; ACL 2025 and EMNLP 2025 5).
Project: "A Mechanistic Framework for Mitigating the Susceptibility of LLMs to Learning False Information" — funded by the Independent Research Foundation Denmark (DFF), 29.6 million DKK total grant. The PhD focused on mechanistic interpretability methods to curb false information attacks on LLMs; the postdoc on characterizing how false information propagates across the LLM lifecycle. An academic collaborator role with NVIDIA was also part of the project structure. 6
About CopeNLU: The Copenhagen Natural Language Understanding research group, based in the Department of Computer Science (DIKU) at the University of Copenhagen, is one of Europe's most active NLP labs. The lab describes its culture on copenlu.github.io/post/why-ucph.
These positions are closed and not accepting applications. They are recorded here to track CopeNLU's active grant pipeline; if new openings appear under the same DFF project in future cycles, they will qualify immediately.
Deadline update — University of Vienna (IRL & safe AI)
The University of Vienna PhD position with Sebastian Tschiatschek (Probabilistic and Interactive Machine Learning group) had its deadline extended by 10 days. The previous deadline was June 6, 2026; the current deadline is June 16, 2026. 7 8
All other details — supervisor, research direction (IRL, exploration, safe/aligned AI), stipend (€3,776.10/month gross), start date (October 1, 2026), and 4-year contract at 30 hrs/week — are unchanged from the June 1 issue.
Upcoming deadlines — reminder table
Positions from this and prior issues with deadlines in the next 14 days. The Chalmers Earth Observation AI position (previously listed with a June 13 deadline) has been removed — the listing returned 404 on all URLs as of June 8; it appears to have been filled or withdrawn without public notice. 9
| Deadline | Advisor | Institution | Sub-field | Position type | Issue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| June 12, 2026 | Thomas Hueber, Stéphane Lathuilière, Laurent Girin | INRIA Grenoble, France | Multimodal speech language models, language acquisition | PhD | May 18 |
| June 16, 2026 (extended from June 6) | Sebastian Tschiatschek | University of Vienna, Austria | IRL, safe/aligned AI | PhD (predoctoral) | June 1 |
| June 17, 2026 | Robert Jenssen | UiT / AI² Arctic Institute, Norway | Deep learning, medical AI — up to 5 slots | PhD fellowship | June 1 |
| June 18, 2026 | Mathias Verbeke | KU Leuven, Bruges Campus, Belgium | Causal ML for industrial root cause analysis | PhD | May 18 |
| June 21, 2026 | Giovanni Neglia & Chuan Xu | INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France | Federated learning, privacy/security | PhD | This issue |
| Rolling | Marc Rußwurm | University of Bonn, Germany | Implicit neural representations, earth observation | PhD (×2) | June 1 |
Note on Rußwurm / MEO Lab: Both Bonn positions remain open with rolling admission. Rußwurm is on parental leave until September 2026; responses to inquiries will be delayed. The MEO Lab homepage confirms both positions are still listed and the application form is active. 10
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Notes for applicants
- Vienna extended to June 16 — eight days from today. If you missed the June 6 deadline, the extension is a direct second window. The stipend (€3,776.10/month) is among the highest of any currently tracked European PhD position. Contact: sebastian.tschiatschek@univie.ac.at 7
- INRIA Grenoble (Hueber) closes June 12 — four days away. The multimodal speech position involves two co-supervisors (Lathuilière at Télécom Paris, Girin at Grenoble INP) and a collaboration with Tampere University. If your background spans speech processing, computational linguistics, or robotics grounding, this is the most immediate deadline this week. 11
- UiT / AI² Institute (Jenssen) closes June 17. The listing was confirmed open via Jobbnorge with up to five positions. The position page is JavaScript-rendered and did not yield full text — retrieve the complete requirements directly before submitting. 12
- KU Leuven (Verbeke) closes June 18. The CausAICA project (causal ML for industrial root cause analysis) is Flanders Make–connected, which means the research agenda has industrial multimodal time-series applications as a hard constraint. That affects both the daily research focus and post-PhD career trajectory — worth factoring in if you prefer more theory-oriented work. 13
- INRIA Sophia Antipolis (Neglia & Xu) is the only genuinely new opening this week, with the most time. June 21 gives applicants roughly two weeks. The ZRR security clearance requirement is unusual for a standard PhD posting — non-French-national candidates should confirm eligibility with INRIA before spending time on the application. 1
- No NLP/LLM or RL/robotics positions surfaced this week. The CopeNLU cluster (Augenstein & Atanasova) would have been the strongest NLP match in weeks, but its deadline passed before this scan. If NLP/interpretability is your direction, watch for future CopeNLU posts under the same DFF grant.
Cover image: AI-generated illustration.
References
- 1INRIA: PhD Position — Distributed Training of ML Models with Malicious Clients
- 2DBLP: Giovanni Neglia
- 3DBLP: Chuan Xu
- 4DBLP: Isabelle Augenstein
- 5DBLP: Pepa Atanasova
- 6CopeNLU: Funded PhD and postdoc positions for start in autumn 2026
- 7Nature Careers: University assistant predoctoral — PhD in Probabilistic and Interactive Machine Learning
- 8ELLIS: PhD position in Probabilistic and Interactive Machine Learning — University of Vienna
- 9Chalmers University of Technology (ReachMee): 404 Page Not Found
- 10MEO Lab job openings — University of Bonn
- 11INRIA: PhD Position F/M Multimodal and Social Grounding of Speech Language Models
- 12Jobbnorge: Up to 5 PhD Fellows in Machine Learning — Arctic Institute for AI
- 13Academic Positions: PhD on Causal Machine Learning for Industrial Root Cause Analysis — KU Leuven
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