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:

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:

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