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Application period

From 18 October to 30 November 2024

Resolution: 18 December 2024

Description

The candidate will develop a doctoral thesis on a topic related to a newly funded research project titled "Multimodal LLMs for Document Undestanding", with the aim of advancing current state-of-the-art in end-to-end document understanding models, taking into account interpretability and privacy guarantees.

It is expected that the candidate will also collaborate in tasks related to the development of the research project and will present and publish the research results in top international conferences and journals.

The PhD student will be co-supervised by Dr Ernest Valveny and Dr Dimostenis Karatzas.

Requirements

• Candidates should not have benefitted, prior to the submission of the application, of a pre-doctoral contract for more than 12 months. 

• Candidates will have to comply with all the accession requirements to a PhD program at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) when accepting the grant. 

• The candidate should possess a MSc degree in computer vision, artificial intelligence, computer science, computer engineering or related subject. 

• We will positively consider previous background in computer vision, deep learning and/or document image analysis, as well as previous experience in research activities. 

• Applicants are expected to be fluent in both oral and written communication in English. They should work well in a team while demonstrating initiative and autonomy.

Funding

The salary offered is established by the Royal Decree 103/2019, of March 1, on the Statute of Research Personnel in Training. These remunerations for 2024 are as follows:

1st year (12 months): at least 60% of Group 1 of €32.465,02 = €19.479,01 gross per year.

2nd, 3rd and 4th years (36 months): 75% of €32.465,02= €24.348,76 gross per year (each year)

*(they could change for 2025)

Duration 

4 years. 

The start of the contract will depend on the final resolution of the AEI project, not coming into force until it is resolved and it is possible to allocate expenses to it. According to the call, the CVC will have 3 months to contract the candidate since the moment the AEI project is approved with the definite resolution. Therefore, the expected start date of the fellowship will be between 1 January to 1 March 2025.

Documents to be submitted

• Cover letter

• Updated Curriculum Vitae

• Academic record (with grades)

• If not in Catalan, Spanish or English, documents should be translated in one of the said languages.

Complete Call and online application submission

Please read the complete call before applying.

CALL FPI92-CVC PRE-DOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP

* Please read the full text of the Call for the detailed evaluation criteria. 

** You can only upload one pdf document, please combine all the required documents into one single file. 

Important dates:

October 2024: Application portal opens

November 15, 2024, 23:59 CET: application deadline (firm)

November/December 2024: review stage

January/February 2025: interview stage

Late February/March 2025: decisions

Program start: there is no common start for the PhD (depends on the advisor/institution)

How to apply

Interested candidates should apply online through the ELLIS application portal by November 15th, 2024, 23:59 CET. Applicants first need to register on the portal. 

Registration Link

After registering, applicants will receive their login details for the portal and can submit their application via apply.ellis.eu. Please read our FAQs and webpage before applying, as well as the details below. Only complete applications will be considered.

Description

We are seeking a PhD student to join the Vision, Language and Reading team in beautiful Barcelona.

VLR is in the Computer Vision Center (www.cvc.uab.es) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. The exact subject of the PhD will be defined between the supervisor and the candidate, but should be related with one of the following main research lines of VLR:

• Privacy guarantees for DocVQA models

• Robust and Explainable DocVQA

• Document Understanding in complex domains (Comics, Maps, Engineering Drawings)

The PhD student will be co-supervised by Dr Dimostenis Karatzas (ELLIS Fellow and director of the ELLIS Unit Barcelona).

Requirements

• Candidates will have to comply with all the accession requirements to a PhD program at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) when accepting the grant. 

• The candidate should possess a MSc degree in computer vision, artificial intelligence, computer science, computer engineering or related subject. 

• We will positively consider previous background in computer vision, deep learning and/or document image analysis, as well as previous experience in research activities. 

• Applicants are expected to be fluent in both oral and written communication in English. They should work well in a team while demonstrating initiative and autonomy.

More Information

Read here for more information: https://ellis.eu/news/ellis-phd-program-call-for-applications-2024

For informal inquiries about the group/topics, send an email to dimos@cvc.uab.es with a subject: "ELLIS PhD Inquiry"

(Catalan Agency for Management of University and Research Grants - AGAUR)

Usually, the call opens around September/October.  PhD studentships are for 3 years and the starting date would be around May of the year after.

Minimum average grade officially required is: 6,50 for the BSc. In reality, candidates with BSc and MSc grades below 8,00 are very difficult to obtain financing. 

In terms of statistics, in 2021, 1017 applications were submitted and of those 246 were granted.

We will only support applications by candidates with good chances of being accepted, and we are able to support only 1-2 students in each round. Please contact us in advance if you are interested in working with us.

(Spanish Ministry of Universities)

Usually, the call opens around October/November. PhD studentships are for 4 years and the starting date would be around September/October of the year after.

The minimum average grades required is 6,84 Bachelor and 7,91 Master (please double check this numbers, as they are updated every year). Nevertheless, candidates with average grade below 9,00 are difficult to obtain financing.

The call has two stages. In the first one, only the CV of candidates are considered. Those candidates selected in the first stage are allowed to submit the application in the second one. In this second stage, CV of the director and group, etc are considered.

In terms of statistics, in 2021 they offered 885 grants over all disciplines. Of these, in the field of Computer Science, 96 applications were selected and 32 granted. The top candidate selected in Computer Science had a grade of 9,688 and the last candidate (#32) had a grade of 9,010. See the 2021 statistics here.

Important: to apply to this call it is necessary to have a National Identity Number from Spain (a NIE). It is not possible to submit an application just with your passport number. If you are not Spanish, ask at your Spanish embassy about how to obtain a NIE number.

We will only support applications by candidates with good chances of being accepted, and we are able to support only 1-2 students in each round. Please contact us in advance if you are interested in working with us.

(Catalan Agency for Management of University and Research Grants - AGAUR)

This call is linked to University departments, and you would be applying to the Computer Science department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Usually, the call opens around March. PhD studentships  are for 3 years and the starting date would be around October/November of the same year.

The minimum average mark required is 6,50 for the BSc. Nevertheless, candidates with average grade below 9,00 are difficult to obtain financing. In terms of statistics, in 2021, 411 applications were submitted and of those 97 were granted. 

We will only support applications by candidates with good chances of being accepted, and we are able to support only 1 student in each round. Please contact us in advance if you are interested in working with us.