Job Information
- Organisation/Company: Czech Technical University in Prague
- Department: Department of Cybernetics
- Research Field: Computer science » Cybernetics
- Researcher Profile: First Stage Researcher (R1)
- Positions: Postdoc Positions
- Application Deadline: 3 Dec 2026 - 23:59 (Europe/Brussels)
- Country: Czech Republic
- Type of Contract: Temporary
- Job Status: Full-time
- Hours Per Week: 40
- Offer Starting Date: 1 Feb 2027
- Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme? Horizon Europe - MSCA
- Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No
Offer Description
Pictus PhD Fellowship Programme
Czech Technical University in Prague – International PhD Programme (PICTUS) will recruit 8 students (see Eligibility criteria below) for a full 48-month employment contract and enroll them in a specific PhD course. Candidates should prepare their own research proposal from the List of topics for the 2nd Call.
Application form should be filled and all required documents uploaded using the dedicated electronic form.
helpdesk: [contact details available in the full listing]
Explainable end-to-end differentiable perception for self-supervised learning in robotics
Description:
Accurate perception, which enables explainable reasoning about possible outcomes of the robot-environment interaction, is essential for many fundamental capabilities, such as localization, mapping, planning or control. Despite several successful robotic's solutions, a robust perception architecture that would allow for efficient self-supervised adaptation in an unknown environment remains an open research problem. We claim that the main issues that prevent one from building such architectures are the following: (i) Black-box architectures that neglect the physical embodiment of the robot, such as deep NNs, suffer from poor generalization, weak explainability, catastrophic forgetting and the impossibility of being transferred among different robotics platforms and environments; (ii) Consequent sample-inefficient learning requires a huge number of expensive, domain-specific, human-annotated data that cannot be transferred to other domains; (iii) Resulting complex architectures have a vast number of parameters that have to be adapted/learned jointly to avoid undesirable interference among independently tuned components. We aim to address these issues by designing grey-box, explainable, embodiment-aware, and end-to-end differentiable architectures that enable joint self-supervised adaptation from any successively incoming onboard measurements in a probabilistically consistent way.
Secondment:
R. Agishev, K. Zimmermann, V. Kubelka, M. Pecka, T. Svoboda. MonoForce: Self-supervised Learning of Physics-aware Model for Predicting Robot-terrain Interaction. IEEE-IROS 2024
V. Salansky, K. Zimmermann, T. Petricek, T. Svoboda. Pose consistency KKT-loss for weakly supervised learning of robot-terrain interaction model. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2021, Volume 6, Issue 3.
co-supervisor: Prof. Tomáš Svoboda
Where to apply
E-mail: [contact details available in the full listing]
Requirements
- Research Field: Computer science » Cybernetics
- Education Level: Master Degree or equivalent
Skills/Qualifications
Required documents to be uploaded to the Application form webpage
- CV including
- a) Education received
- b) Any working and professional experience
- c) Prizes and Awards
- d) Participation at projects
- e) Internships
- f) List of publications
- Master thesis pdf max 20 MB
- Research proposal Select one of the List of topics for the 2nd Call. Required sections: 1) Excellence incl. methodology, 2) Impact incl. expected outputs of the project, 3) Quality and Efficiency of the Implementation, including work plan, Risk assessment and ethical issues 4), Personal motivation: description of career goals, foreseen advancement in research and professional skills of the Applicant. Methodology and workplan should be planned, ethical issues should be discussed and short risk analysis performed. Consult your proposal with the respective Supervisor. You are encouraged to communicate with the Supervisor before you submit the application. Supervisors’ role is limited to providing scientific advice, discussing the proposed research, or gathering information about available expertise or infrastructure.
- Master degree diploma or a proof, that all conditions for Master degree will be fullfilled
Please note that candidates should contact the potential supervisor for details and consult their research proposal. Candidates should apply for the PhD program at the same time as their PICTUS fellowship application. At some faculties the PhD admission is currently closed. In such case submit application for PICTUS and you will be notified to submit your PhD application once the PhD submission system is open.
Redress Procedure.
All applicants will have the opportunity to redress within 10 days from communicating the results.
Specific Requirements
Experience:
* Master degree at the deadline date (candidates who submitted their Master thesis will also be considered)
* previous studies compatible with the project they intend to apply with
Mobility: applicants must not have resided or carried out their main activity in the Czech Republic for more than 12 months in the 3 years prior to the Calls’ deadline (career breaks not counted).
Completeness: applications need to be completed with all the required documents.
- Languages: ENGLISH
- Level: Good
Additional Information
Benefits
Benefits
Gross monthly salary of 2 444 EUR/month + mobility allowance 444 EUR/month (in total approx. 69 000 CZK/month*)
Family allowance 8 888 CZK/month (for applicants with dependent family members)
Travel support for conferences and secondments
Research costs1
*The gross monthly salary CZK is under the standard scheme in the Czech Republic and includes mandatory social and health insurance. Therefore, the gross salary contains an employee contribution to social and health insurance of 11% and it is standardly taxable (15 % rate). Some tax discounts are given to e.g. employees with children. All rates subject to adjustments due to changing exchange rate. Mobility and Family allowance can be tax free.
Example: a single researcher would get approx. 55 000 CZK as net salary
The offered salary is equivalent to the standard MSCA individual postdoc award, and it is highly competitive in the Czech Republic
Website for additional job details: https://sites.google.com/view/karelzimermann
Work Location(s)
- Number of offers available: 1
- Company/Institute: Faculty of Electrical Engineering
- Country: Czech Republic
- City: Prague 2
- Postal Code: 120 00
- Street: Karlovo náměstí 13
Contact
- State/Province: Czech Republic
- City: Prague
- Website: https://www.cvut.cz/en
- Street: Jugoslávských partyzánů 1580/3
- Postal Code: 16000
- E-Mail: [contact details available in the full listing]
