We invite applications for position as PhD Research Fellow in Multisensory Networked Interactions with Robotics Avatars available at Department of Informatics.
The fellowship period is three years. Depending on the candidate and the teaching needs of the department, the fellowship period can be extended either for compulsory work consisting of e.g. teaching and supervision duties and research assistance up top four years.
Starting date as soon as possible.
No one can be appointed for more than one PhD Research Fellowship period at the University of Oslo.
Place of work is the Department of Informatics at Blindern, Oslo.
The PhD fellowship position is located at the Department of Informatics and is hosted jointly by the Network and Distributed Systems Research Group and the Robotics and Intelligent Systems Research Group. The research groups consist of around 30 full- and part-time faculty members and several postdoctoral researchers and PhD students. The research groups conduct research in various areas of mobile network systems, multimedia and AR/VR/XR systems, robotics and machine learning, focusing on fundamental aspects as well as on applications in multidisciplinary contexts.
This position is part of the DRIVE project, funded by the Research Council of Norway (RCN) (2026-2030), focusing on brain-driven multi-sensory robotic avatars for remote collaborative physical work. The DRIVE project involves Simula Research Laboratory and University of Texas at Austin, USA, as partners. In addition, this PhD candidate will be able to participate and exploit synergies with the National AI Centre for AI and Creativity (MishMash), led by University of Oslo, funded by the RCN (2025-2030).
The successful candidate will join the Sustainable Immersive Networking Lab (SINLAB), a multidisciplinary team working on systems that enable users to act in remote physical spaces and experience the effects of their actions through multimodal feedback (audio, video, haptics). While SINLAB addresses applications in health, industry, education, sports, entertainment and creative domains, the focus of the PhD candidate will be on remote collaborative physical work especially the real-time interaction among humans and between humans and a remote environment.
The main challenge with such networked interactions is that haptic feedback has very stringent delay requirements as low as 20 milliseconds. Therefore, performing such actions remotely with both action and reaction traversing long distances is far beyond our technical capabilities today. Even the developments in 5G and beyond networks that specifically target significant latency reductions are not sufficient due to physical as well as resource limitations.
The core research objective of this PhD is to design and evaluate “latency hiding” methods for immersive networked interactions. This involves (i) developing predictive machine learning models that forecast user actions and remote system responses across audio, video and haptic modalities, and (ii) jointly orchestrating network and computing resources to compensate for the gap between physical latency limits and human perceptual tolerances. The work will comprise designing networking and computing architectures that integrate prediction and control algorithms, optimizing data transformations, offloading and distributed computing, and exploiting mechanisms such as network slicing and multi-access edge computing. The overarching goal is to guarantee perceptual latency budgets and to devise embodiment recovery strategies when these budgets are exceeded, enabling consistent, realistic and cognitively coherent remote physical interaction with robotic avatars.
The Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences has a strategic ambition to be among Europe’s leading communities for research, education and innovation. Candidates for these fellowships will be selected in accordance with this, and expected to be in the upper segment of their class with respect to academic credentials.
Candidates without a master’s degree have until June 30, 2026 to complete the final exam.
Grade requirements:
The norm is as follows:
The purpose of the fellowship is research training leading to the successful completion of a PhD degree. For more information see:
http://www.mn.uio.no/english/research/phd/
All candidates and projects will have to undergo a check versus national export, sanctions and security regulations. Candidates may be excluded based on these checks. Primary checkpoints are the Export Control regulation, the Sanctions regulation, and the national security regulation.
Employment in the position is based on a comprehensive assessment of all qualification requirements applicable to the position, including personal qualifications.
UiO is an open and internationally oriented comprehensive university that strives to be an inclusive and diverse workplace and academic environment. You can read more about UiO’s work on equality, inclusion, and diversity at uio.no.
We fulfill our mission most effectively when we draw upon our variety of experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives. We are looking for great colleagues, could you be the next one?
We will do our best to accommodate your needs. Relevant adjustments may include modifications to working hours, task adaptations, digital, technical, or physical adjustments, or other practical measures.
If you have an immigrant background, a disability, or CV gaps (Norwegian), we encourage you to indicate this in the job application portal. We always invite at least one qualified candidate from each group for an interview. In this context, disability is defined as an applicant who identifies as having a disability that requires workplace or employment-related accommodations. For more details about the requirements, please refer to the Employer portal (Norwegian).
The selections made in the job application portal are used for anonymized statistics that all state employers include in their annual reports. More information about gender equality initiatives at UiO can be found here.
We hope you will apply for the position with us.
Application with attachments must be submitted via our recruitment system Jobbnorge, click "Apply for this job". Foreign applicants should attach an official explanation of their University's grading system.
When applying for the position, we ask you to retrieve your education results from Vitnemålsportalen.no. If your education results are not available through Vitnemålsportalen, we ask you to upload copies of your transcripts or grades. Please note that all documentation must be in English or a Scandinavian language.
The best qualified candidates will invited for interviews.
Applicant lists can be published in accordance with
Norwegian Freedom of Information Act § 25. When you apply for a position with us, your name will appear on the public applicant list. It is possible to request to be excluded from this list. You must justify why you want an exemption from publication and we will then decide whether we can grant your request. If we can't, you will hear from us.Please refer to Regulations for the Act on universities and colleges chapter 3 (Norwegian), Guidelines concerning appointment to post doctoral and research posts at UiO (Norwegian) and Regulations for the degree of Philosophiae Doctor (PhD) at the University of Oslo.
The University of Oslo has a transfer agreement with all employees that is intended to secure the rights to all research results etc.
The University of Oslo is Norway’s oldest and highest rated institution of research and education with 26 500 students and 7 200 employees. Its broad range of academic disciplines and internationally esteemed research communities make UiO an important contributor to society.
The Department of Informatics (IFI) is one of nine departments belonging to the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. IFI is Norway’s largest university department for general education and research in Computer Science and related topics.
The Department has more than 1800 students on bachelor level, 600 master students, and over 240 PhDs and postdocs. The overall staff of the Department is close to 370 employees, about 280 of these in full time positions. The full time tenured academic staff is 75, mostly Full/Associate Professors.
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