Dear colleagues,
I have a fully funded open PhD position, jointly with my colleague Alessio Mansutti, at the IMDEA Software Institute in Madrid, Spain.
The PhD topic focuses on foundational research at the intersection of machine learning and formal verification. Machine learning has shown significant potential for a wide range of synthesis tasks, including controller and program synthesis. The goal of the PhD research is to develop a general learning-enabled synthesis framework that combines the flexibility of machine learning with the rigorous correctness guarantees of formal methods. The project will focus on Skolem function synthesis as a general formulation of synthesis problems, with applications across different domains, including controller synthesis, program synthesis, and solving partial differential equations.
Applicants need to have a recent master's degree in CS or mathematics and the willingness to work in problems in the intersection of theory and practice.
The ideal starting date is between January 1 and March 1, 2027. The application deadline is *September 30, 2026*.
Interested candidates need to apply here: https://software.imdea.org/careers/2026-09-phd-lns/
If you have further questions, please feel free to reach out at: kaushik.mallik@imdea.org or alessio.mansutti@imdea.org.
Best,
Kaushik