PhD: Privacy‑Preserving Secure ML for Collaborative LMs

Aalborg University; København; On-site; DKK 320,000 - 420,000; Full time

Job summary

The Department of Electronic Systems at Aalborg University invites applications for a PhD stipend in secure machine learning within the Electronic and Electrical Engineering programme. The PhD position is funded under the Technical Doctoral School and aims to develop privacy-preserving, secure collaboration for language-model based agents.

The successful candidate will work with the AI:SECURITY LAB and cybersecurity group, focusing on privacy-preserving distributed learning, secure multiparty

Qualifications

• Master's degree required in information engineering, computer science, cybersecurity, software engineering or related fields.
• Strong motivation to contribute to cutting-edge AI and security research.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills.
• Ability to work independently and collaboratively in interdisciplinary teams.
• Prior background in privacy-preserving ML, distributed training, large language models, agentic AI, or cryptographic protocols is advantageous but not required.

Responsibilities

• Work on privacy-preserving distributed learning for language models, combining federated learning or decentralized training with differential privacy and secure aggregation.
• Develop cryptographic protection mechanisms for collaborative inference and fine-tuning to keep updates, gradients, and representations confidential.
• Design defenses against model extraction and chain-of-thought extraction attacks in multi-agent settings.
• Explore secure agentic AI where autonomous language agents negotiate, verify, and execute privacy-sensitive tasks without information leakage.

Skills

Privacy-preserving ML

Distributed training

Large language models

Agentic AI

Cryptographic protocols

Education

Master's degree in information Engineering, computer science, cybersecurity, software engineering

Job description

The Department of Electronic Systems at Aalborg University invites applications for a PhD stipend in secure machine learning within the Electronic and Electrical Engineering programme. The PhD position is funded under the Technical Doctoral School and aims to develop privacy-preserving, secure collaboration for language-model based agents.

The successful candidate will work with the AI:SECURITY LAB and cybersecurity group, focusing on privacy-preserving distributed learning, secure multiparty