Athena RC - UoI - QMUL 2x PhD Studentships 2025
About the Projects
Title: AI Agents for Holistic Behavior Understanding, Modeling, Analysis and Generation
We invite applications for two funded PhD projects on next-generation AI agents capable of understanding, modeling, analyzing, and generating human behavior in real-world scenarios.
The research will integrate LLMs, VLMs and MLLMs as well as standard deep learning models (e.g. Transformers, Mamba) to process and reason over images/videos, audio and natural language. The goal is to create holistic, context-aware, robust, and trustworthy AI agents that can operate in-the-wild, adapt to individuals, and interact naturally in diverse applications. Core research directions:
Multimodal Fusion: Seamlessly combining visual, auditory and textual cues for comprehensive behavioral understanding.
Cross-Modal Learning: Developing modality-aware transformers that learn shared, semantics-grounded tokens across text, audio, and vision—enabling transfer, cross-modal reasoning, and alignment-free adaptation.
Holistic Modeling: Capturing overt actions, subtle non-verbal signals, contextual cues and interpersonal dynamics.
Personalized AI Agents: Adapting models to individual behaviors and preferences for tailored interaction.
Generative AI for Behavior: Synthesizing realistic and controllable human behavior for simulation, training and entertainment.
Trustworthy & Robust Systems: Ensuring explainability, reliability and fairness in unconstrained environments.
Embodied AI Agents: Enabling real-time reasoning, decision-making, and interaction in both physical and virtual settings.
The project sits at the intersection of multimodal AI, generative modeling, and human-centered computing, with potential applications in healthcare, education, social robotics and interactive entertainment.
If you are passionate about AI agents, multimodality, and human behavior understanding, and aspire to advance the frontier of personalized, context-aware AI, we encourage you to apply.
Supervisors:
Prof. Christophoros Nikou, University of Ioannina, Greece
Dr. Dimitrios Kollias, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Dr. Vassilis Katsouros, Director, Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athena Research Center, Greece
Expected Start Date:
In 2025
Candidates Profiles:
We are seeking talented students with a passion for AI and deep learning.
If you are familiar with behavior understanding, modeling and analysis, and platforms such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or Scikit-learn, you’re already ahead of the game!
Ideal candidates:
🔹 Greek origin
🔹 Willingness to relocate to Athens
🔹 Hold (or are expected to obtain) one of the following:
Integrated master's in Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a closely related discipline.
A 4-year bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, with an additional master's in Computer Science or Engineering.
Benefits of joining us:
✨ Work on cutting-edge research with real-world applications
✨ Engage in a collaborative research environment with Athena Research Center (Archimedes / Institute for Language and Speech Processing), University of Ioannina and Queen Mary University of London
✨ Competitive stipend and research funding
Application Deadline: Apply as soon as possible!
How to apply
Please send your CV to Dr. Dimitrios Kollias at d.kollias@qmul.ac.uk