PhD Candidate in Trustworthy Agentic Artificial Intelligence

About this job

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KHQjc4ndas&t=41s About the position Would you like to work at the intersection of artificial intelligence, autonomy and maritime technology, contributing to AI systems that are safe, transparent and accountable? The Department of ICT and Natural Sciences at NTNU in Ålesund has a vacancy for a PhD Candidate in trustworthy agentic artificial intelligence. The PhD research project is part of the new Norwegian Maritime AI Center, led by NTNU. Agentic AI systems are moving rapidly from research prototypes into real-world applications. In safety-critical domains such as maritime operations, their adoption depends on whether their behaviour and decisions can be understood, verified, constrained, and audited. This is particularly challenging when using closed, proprietary models, where model weights, training data, and internal representations are inaccessible. The PhD project will therefore investigate how trustworthy agentic AI systems can be developed using open-weight models. Access to model weights enables the candidate to inspect and adapt the models, investigate their internal representations, apply interpretability and verification methods, fine-tune and align them for specific operational domains, and deploy them locally under full control of sensitive operational data. A central maritime use case will be condition monitoring and predictive maintenance of ships and maritime systems. Modern vessels generate large amounts of heterogeneous operational data from sensors, machinery, control systems, maintenance records, and other sources. The candidate will investigate how agentic AI can autonomously interact with such data and relevant engineering tools to identify abnormal behaviour, reason about possible faults, assess equipment condition, and support maintenance decisions. For example, an AI agent could combine sensor measurements and historical maintenance information, invoke diagnostic or predictive models, identify evidence of component degradation, and recommend appropriate maintenance actions. The position offers the opportunity to conduct cutting-edge research in trustworthy and agentic AI within a growing AI research environment, with access to relevant maritime expertise, data, and use cases and strong links to the Norwegian maritime industry. Your immediate leader will be the Head of Department. About the project The center shall position the maritime sector for accelerated and successful use of AI. The demand for safe and sustainable maritime activities, as well as the shortage of crew and engineers, are key drivers for change in the maritime sector. At the same time, there is a pull for growth, increased efficiency and profitability, while managing volatility in the markets. Moreover, the sector is critically important for global supply chains and security in a tense geopolitical situation. To demonstrate and prototype maritime AI solutions, the center will address a diverse and impactful set of use cases: Logistics, shipping and business transactions; Ship design and construction; Voyage planning and optimization; Condition monitoring and maintenance; Crew training; Maritime traffic and ship surveillance; Decarbonization and energy management; Autonomous ships and remote control. The research partners are the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), University of Oslo, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Royal Norwegian Naval Academy, Norwegian Mapping Authority, MET and SINTEF Nordvest. There are about 30 user partners from the maritime sector, in addition to hundreds of members of the Maritime Forum, Blue Maritime, Ocean Autonomy, and Maritime CleanTech clusters. The center will be a hub, orchestrating the interfaces with research partners and user partners to facilitate collaboration, knowledge creation, dissemination, innovation, and sharing of knowledge. The Norwegian Maritime AI Center is funded by the Research Council of Norway and the partners for the period. There will be approximately 25 doctoral scholarships and some postdoc positions. More information can be found here: Norwegian Maritime AI Center. Duties of the position Conduct research on trustworthy agentic AI built on open-weight foundation models, including agent architectures, reasoning, planning and tool use, and the efficient adaptation of open models for locally deployed, domain-specific use. Develop and evaluate methods that make agent behaviour reliable and accountable, such as uncertainty quantification, interpretability, alignment, monitoring and human oversight, taking into account relevant stand

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