EURECOM’s Digital Security Department is seeking a highly motivated PhD candidate to join the GOOD-BIAS! research project, supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR). This project addresses one of today’s most pressing challenges: ensuring fairness, robustness, and transparency in AI-driven face recognition systems. While recent advances in AI have revolutionized computer vision and biometrics, they often suffer from bias, lack of transparency, and shortcut learning, leading to unfair and unreliable outcomes across demographic groups. GOOD-BIAS! sets out to design the next generation of trustworthy algorithms, capable of delivering robust and equitable results under real-world conditions.
The PhD candidate will contribute to:
- Developing robust and fair computer vision algorithms for face recognition in applications such as identity verification, age/gender classification, presentation attack detection, and deepfake detection;
- Designing holistic evaluation metrics that balance accuracy and fairness;
- Investigating and disentangling sources of bias beyond demographics, including data quality and acquisition conditions;
- Exploring generalisation strategies to achieve robust performances across heterogeneous biometric data and AI models.
We are looking for a passionate candidate with a strong background in machine learning or computer vision, solid programming skills, and a strong interest in ethical and trustworthy AI.
This fully funded 3-year PhD position offers an outstanding opportunity to conduct cutting-edge research in a world-class environment. You will closely collaborate with leading experts in AI, biometrics, and fairness from academy and industry. The position includes opportunities to visit international laboratories and to present your work at major scientific conferences, providing exceptional visibility within the research community.
Requirements
- Education Level / Degree: Master’s degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science or related fields.
- Field / specialty: Machine Learning / Biometrics / Image Forensics / Signal and Image Processing.
- Technologies: good knowledge of parallel computing platforms.
- Languages / systems: ability to produce clean and efficient code given any programming language manual. Most of the existing code is written in Python and C/C++.
- Other skills / specialties: strong signal/image processing background.
Other important elements: Excellent analytical thinking and a strong motivation to work on interdisciplinary research problems. Fluency in English (language of work).
Application
The application must include:
- Detailed curriculum,
- List of publications specifying the three most important publications,
- Motivation letter of two pages also presenting the perspectives of research and education,
- Name and address of three references.
Applications should be submitted by e-mail to secretariat@eurecom.fr with the reference: SN/CG/fairness/092025
Start date: January 2026
Duration: Duration of the thesis
