I am always looking for talented Master students and early-career researchers to join our team at IIIA-CSIC. I am particularly interested in the following topics:

1. Vulnerabilities, failures modes and attack surfaces, including (1) evasion attacks, (2) poisoning attacks and (3) model extraction and inference attacks. We are interested in developing methods to exploit AI-based systems.
2. Risk mitigation strategies and adversarial defenses, i.e. strategies to mitigate the risk of the different failure modes, adversarial threats and minimize the attack surfaces of AI-based systems, including algorithms that prioritize security compliance and potential certification schemes.
3. Interpretable and explainable AI. We are interested in developing methods to explain the decisions of AI systems, to make them more transparent and understandable to humans, and to detect and mitigate biases and unfairness in AI systems.

Prospective Master students

IIIA-CSIC offers scholarships such as the JAE Intro Scholarship for students who want to carry out basic research at our centre. These scholarships, if available, will be listed in open positions.

If you are interested in carry out your final year project at IIIA in one of the aforementioned topics, please get in touch with me.

Prospective Ph.D. Candidates

IIIA belongs to the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), which is not a higher-educational institution. As such, IIIA do not grant PhD degrees. The doctoral students get their degree by enrolling in a PhD programme of some university, but they get hosted at IIIA and supervised by us. Concerning which university to choose, IIIA is relatively neutral regarding the PhD programme the students decide to register to, provided the university allows that the supervision and research is carried out at IIIA. Most of the students have obtained their PhD degree from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), since the institute is located on UAB’s main campus and the staff is listed as academic tutors and PhD supervisors of its PhD programme in Computer Science.

There are various options of funding for PhD students:

• Through research projects.
• Grants from AGAUR, the Catalan government’s funding agency.
• Grants from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.
• Grants from private entities.

If you are interested in any of the listed topics, I invite you to contact me.