Aalborg University’s (AAU) Department of Electronic Systems, based in Copenhagen, is recruiting a PhD fellow to work on secure and privacy-preserving machine learning for collaborative language models. The position suits a candidate with a background in computer science, information engineering or cybersecurity who wants to combine artificial intelligence research with security and privacy engineering.
The role
- Develop frameworks that let multiple language model agents collaborate securely
- Design privacy-preserving distributed learning methods, combining federated learning with differential privacy techniques
- Build cryptographic protection mechanisms for collaborative inference and fine-tuning, such as secure multi-party computation or homomorphic encryption
- Research defenses against model extraction and reasoning-chain extraction attacks in multi-agent settings
- Design protocols for agentic AI systems that avoid leaking context or state
Requirements
- Master’s degree in information engineering, computer science, cybersecurity, software engineering or a related field
- Strong programming skills, particularly in Python
- Ability to work both independently and in an interdisciplinary team, with good English communication skills
- Experience with privacy-preserving machine learning, distributed training, large language models or cryptographic protocols is an advantage, not a requirement
About the employer
The PhD fellow will join the cybersecurity group (around 20 staff) and the AI:SECURITY LAB, part of a growing research environment on AI security within natural language processing at AAU’s Department of Electronic Systems. AAU is an international university with more than 3,700 employees, with campuses in Aalborg, Esbjerg and Copenhagen.
Salary and deadline
Salary and terms follow the collective agreement between the Danish state and the Danish Confederation of Professional Associations (AC); the ad does not state a specific salary figure. The position is a 3-year fellowship expected to start 1 November 2026.
The application deadline is 04/10/2026 at 23:59. The ad does not state a remote-work policy or the exact number of positions available.
Source: Aalborg University, “PhD in Secure and Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Language Models”, read 11 September 2026. Summary by AVIDE; see the original page for the full and current text.