Postdoc Position in Cooperative Perception & Multiterminal AI for Autonomous Vehicles

1 - Working at the VUB

For more than 50 years, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel has stood for freedom, equality and solidarity, and this is very much alive on our campuses among students and staff alike. 

 

At the VUB, you will find a diverse collection of personalities: innovators pur sang, but above all people who are 100% their authentic selves. With some 4,000 employees, we are the largest Dutch-speaking employer, in the private sector, in Brussels; an international city with which we are only too happy to connect and where (around) our 4 campuses are located. 

 

Add to this our principle of free research - in which self-reflection, a critical attitude and an open, creative mind around scientific and social issues are central - and you have a university that is fundamentally groundbreaking and pioneering in education and research. In short: the VUB all over again. 

 

Moreover, the VUB is a member of EUTOPIA, an alliance of like-minded European universities, all ready to reinvent themselves.

2 - Position description

The Faculty of Engineering, Department Elektronica en informatica, research group Electronics and Informatics: Research – Development - Innovation, is looking for a postdoctoral researcher. 

 

More concretely your work package contains: 

We invite you for a fully-funded postdoctoral researcher within the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant “Reinventing Multiterminal Coding for Intelligent Machines (IONIAN).”

 

Why cooperative perception?

State-of-the-art autonomous vehicles can miss a critical obstacle when their camera is blinded by sun glare, or their LiDAR beam is blocked by a truck. To reach level-4/5 autonomy, we need teamwork: nearby vehicles, drones, and roadside units must co-perceive their environment, sharing and fusing complementary sensor views in real time. Yet raw video and point-cloud streams are massive, wireless links are unreliable, and safety demands that information be both timely and trustworthy.

 

IONIAN tackles this bottleneck head-on. We will re-invent multi-agent AI, cooperative vision, and compression protocols so fleets of intelligent machines can perceive the world—robustly, efficiently, and in a trustworthy manner—even when individual sensors fail or are occluded.

 

Position Overview

As a postdoctoral researcher, you will forge a novel framework for cooperative perception by disrupting today’s most vibrant research threads in AI:

• Generative Diffusion & 3D/4D Scene Synthesis: Re-design diffusion and NeRF-style models so multiple agents jointly reconstruct a scene.
• Cooperative Scene Understanding: Re-design semantic segmentation and object-detection models in a cooperative perception setting.
• Semantic-Aware Compression & Network Information Theory: Derive new rate–distortion–reliability bounds, design adaptive codecs that prioritise safety-critical bits, and close the
• loop between information theory and AI models for cooperative perception.
• Real-World Validation: Deploy and benchmark your algorithms on our autonomous vehicle, mobile robots, and UAV testbeds.

 

You will:

• Publish in CVPR/ICCV/ECCV, NeurIPS/ICLR, INFOCOM/ISIT and leading IEEE journals (T-PAMI, T-IP, T-IT, T-CSVT and T-SP).
• Collaborate with top EU & US labs and industry partners.
• Mentor PhD and Master’s students and assist in project follow-up.

 

For this function, our Brussels Humanities, Sciences & Engineering Campus (Elsene) will serve as your home base. 

3 - Profile

What do we expect from you?

 

• PhD degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, or related field

 

• Solid grounding in computer vision, machine learning, image, video, or point cloud processing.
• Record of first-author publications in reputable conferences like NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, and top-tier journals like IEEE T-IP, T-SP, T-PAMI.
• Proficiency with deep learning (PyTorch/TensorFlow/JAX).
• Genuine interest in: deep learning for generative AI, 3D vision, and compression.
• Strong programming skills; analytical rigour; excellent English.

Nice-to-Haves

• Prior work on cooperative perception, vision-language models, or compression algorithms.
• Experience with robotics, autonomous vehicles, and multi-agent AI.

 

The VUB wants to be a reflection of the society where everyone's talent is valued, regardless of gender, age, religion, skin color, migration background, disability and neurodiversity.

4 - Offer

Are you going to be our new colleague?

 

You’ll be offered a contract, for an assignment of 1 FTE, for 12 months (extendable, on condition of the positive evaluation of the research activities), with planned starting date 01/09/2025. 

 

You’ll receive a salary linked to one of the scales set by the government.

 

At the VUB, you’re guaranteed an open, involved and diverse workplace where you are offered opportunities to (further) build on your career.

 

As well as this, you will also enjoy various other benefits:

• Extensive homeworking options, a telework allowance of 50 euros per month OR an internet fee of 20 euros per month;
• An open and informal working environment where attention is paid to work-life balance, and exceptional holiday arrangements with 35 days of leave (based on a fulltime contract), closure between Christmas and New Year and 3 extra leave days;
• Cost-free hospitalisation insurance;
• Full reimbursement of your home-to-work commute with public transport according to VUB-policy, and/or compensation if you come by bike; 
• A wide selection of meals in our campus restaurants at attractive prices;
• Excellent and affordable facilities for sport and exercise, a range of discounts via Benefits@Work (in  all kinds of shops, on flights, in petrol stations, amusement parks...) and Ecocheques; 
• Nursery near campus, discount on holiday camps; 
• The space to form your job content and to continuously learn through our VUB learning platforms and training courses;
• And finally: great colleagues with a healthy drive.

5 - Interested?

Is this the job you’ve been dreaming of?

 

Then apply, at the latest on 01/08/2025, via jobs.vub.be, and combine the following into one PDF and email it to nikos.deligiannis@vub.be:

• cover Letter (1-2 pages) - motivation and fit;
• curriculum Vitae - education, publications, skills, GitHub / software portfolio link;
• references - contact details of 2-3 referees;
• your diploma (not applicable for VUB alumni).

 

Do you have questions about the job content? Contact Prof. N. Deligiannis at nikos.deligiannis@vub.be or on +32 (0)2 629 1683.

 

Would you like to know what it’s like to work at the VUB? Go to jobs.vub.be, and find all there is to know about our campuses, benefits, strategic goals and your future colleagues.

 

Would you like more information about EUTOPIA? Go to eutopia-university.eu, and read more about the role of the VUB in the development of the EUTOPIA alliance.