IBM-Trinity College PhD in Artificial Intelligence

• Couple LLM agents to complex simulators and data-driven models: propose scenarios, generate code/parameters, call surrogates, and trigger high-fidelity runs when warranted.
• Develop an evaluation harness and metrics beyond standard NLP (e.g., causal consistency, goal-directed planning under KG constraints, sample efficiency, robustness to shift, cost/latency).
• Release a reproducible benchmark suite and, where feasible, a public challenge.
• Leverage simulation-derived synthetic data and retrieval-augmented generation; explore alignment (preference optimisation / lightweight RL) with causal/KG-aware reward signals.
The selected student will be employed by IBM and be a registered PhD student at Trinity, resulting in the following benefits:
• Access to resources and expertise both at IBM Research and Trinity
• Research experience in both private and public sectors
• A substantial PhD Salary
• Full Trinity PhD programme fees paid

Required education

Master's Degree

Preferred education

Master's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

Example research directions:
• Design LLM agents whose planning and tool-use are guided/guardrailed by expert-defined or discovered knowledge graphs - either augmenting discovered relations with LLMs or constraining retrieval, reasoning and action selection via the KG.
• Couple LLM agents to complex simulators and data-driven models: propose scenarios, generate code/parameters, call surrogates, and trigger high-fidelity runs when warranted.
• Develop an evaluation harness and metrics beyond standard NLP (e.g., causal consistency, goal-directed planning under KG constraints, sample efficiency, robustness to shift, cost/latency).
• Release a reproducible benchmark suite and, where feasible, a public challenge.
• Leverage simulation-derived synthetic data and retrieval-augmented generation; explore alignment (preference optimisation / lightweight RL) with causal/KG-aware reward signals.
The selected student will be employed by IBM and be a registered PhD student at Trinity, resulting in the following benefits:
• Access to resources and expertise both at IBM Research and Trinity
• Research experience in both private and public sectors
• A substantial PhD Salary
• Full Trinity PhD programme fees paid

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OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILS

For additional information about location requirements, please discuss with the recruiter following submission of your application.

Client-provided location(s): Dublin, Ireland

Job ID: IBM-61239

Employment Type: INTERN

Posted: 2025-09-26T18:48:48