At the Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence the doctoral program benefits from the synergies of six different research groups, focusing on interdisciplinary research to advance AI. In order to broaden the application areas of our AI research in the LIT AI Lab, we collaborate closely with other JKU institutes that conduct related research as well as with international companies. The  ELLIS PhD and PostDoc Programme, opens an external URL in a new window educates ELLIS PhD students and provides post-doctoral training to the best young researchers in the field.

In December 2019 the LIT AI Laboratory was chosen as one unit of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS, opens an external URL in a new window). Prof. Hochreiter is the director of the ELLIS Unit at the LIT AI Laboratory, while Prof. Widmer and Prof. Fürnkranz are deputy directors.

The European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems offers an interdisciplinary PhD program, opens an external URL in a new window. The ELLIS PhD program is a key element of the ELLIS initiative and its goal is to foster and educate the best talent in machine learning related research areas by pairing outstanding students with leading academic and industrial researchers in Europe.

The program supports excellent PhDs across Europe by giving them access to leading research through boot camps, summer schools and workshops of the ELLIS programs. Every PhD student is supervised by one ELLIS fellow/scholar and one ELLIS member from a different country and conducts a 1 year exchange at the other location.

Research areas include (but are not limited to) the following ML driven reseach areas:

• Machine Learning Algorithms
• Machine Learning Theory
• Optimization
• Deep Learning
• Interactive and Online Learning
• Reinforcement Learning and Control
• Computer Vision
• Computer Graphics
• Robotics
• Human Computer Interaction
• Natural Language Processing
• Causality
• Interpretability and Fairness
• Robust and Trustworthy ML
• Quantum and Physics based ML
• Symbolic Machine Learning 
• Computational Neuroscience
• Earth and Climate Sciences
• Bioinformatics
• Health

ELLIS seeks to increase diversity and the number of women in areas where they are underrepresented and we explicitly encourage women to apply. We are committed to employing more handicapped individuals and especially encourage them to apply.

The call for applications for the ELLIS PhD Program closed on December 1, 2020. In its first recruitment round, the ELLIS PhD program attracted more than 1,300 registered applicants. After an initial pre-screen, 850 eligible candidates from nearly 70 different countries were released to ELLIS faculty for further review. These numbers clearly show that the program has generated a significant buzz among young scientists well beyond Europe.