Two Full Professorships (salary scale W3) in Computer Science in the fields of “Responsible AI” and “Social Computing” (m/f/d), as part of the “AI, Computing, & Society (AICS)” initiative
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With about 17,000 students, more than 300 professorships and around 160 degree programs, the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU) is the technical university of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. As a place of top international research, it offers excellent working conditions and career opportunities. Those who study, research or work at RPTU experience a cosmopolitan environment and shape the future.
The Department of Computer Science at RPTU at campus Kaiserslautern (until 2022 TU Kaiserslautern) combines fundamental research and education with excellence in application and regularly achieves top positions in relevant rankings. There are many opportunities for cooperation with affiliated research institutes such as the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE), and the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics (ITWM).
Your tasks include:
About AI, Computing, and Society (AICS): In 2024, RPTU and MPI-SWS launched the AICS initiative to tackle the pressing scientific and engineering challenges posed by our increasingly AI-driven computing-mediated societies. The AICS initiative will bring together world-leading computer, social, and cognitive scientists across both RPTU and the Max Planck Society (MPS) in a common endeavour to investigate and steer the rapid developments in AI technologies and the myriad ways in which AI systems are being integrated into and reshaping our personal and societal lives. As part of the initiative, RPTU and MPI-SWS have established a cluster of faculty positions which will also help bridge technical AI systems research with social and cognitive sciences.
About the Opening: The department of computer science at RPTU is seeking qualified candidates for two full professorships (W3) in computer science, one with a focus on “Responsible AI” and another with a focus on “Social Computing” . Applicants should have a strong grounding in computer science and a strong interest in pursuing interdisciplinary research. Suitable candidates should have an excellent record of internationally visible scientific achievements demonstrating their ability to conduct research at the frontiers of computer science. Successful candidates will also be considered for appointment as Max Planck Fellows, which would allow them to head a research group at MPI-SWS for the duration of their fellowship.
Applicants should be able to demonstrate excellent and international research achievements in one or more of the following areas or in closely related fields.
Professorship in Responsible AI
● Safety, robustness, and trustworthiness of AI systems
● Human-AI alignment & interaction
● Explainable AI systems & interpretability of AI models
● Fairness and privacy concerns with AI systems
● Governance, policy, and regulation of AI systems
● Behavior, cognition, & reasoning in generative AI systems
● AI agents mediating markets/media & multi-agent systems
● Evaluations of data, models, and systems
Professorship in Social Computing
● Computational social science
● Computational social choice
● Computing supported decisions, collaborative work, markets, and media
● Novel applications of data science for societal good
● Design and evaluation of societal observatories and societal-scale platforms
● Governance, policy, and regulation of emerging (particularly, AI-driven) technologies
● Social (legal, economic, ethical, political) dimensions of emerging technologies
We expect excellent and internationally visible research performance, exhibited through publications of high-rated conferences and/or journals (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, WWW, SIGIR, KDD, ICWSM, CSCW, CHI, EC).
Your profile:
Successful candidates are expected to develop and pursue creative, unique, and highly visible research programs, both independently and in collaboration with other researchers at RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau, MPI-SWS, and related research institutes in Kaiserslautern. Candidates are also expected to actively contribute to departmental teaching. For this, they should have excellent didactic skills and experience with teaching and third-party fundraising. The teaching language is English or German (for basic courses). Successful candidates are expected to acquire sufficient proficiency in German within an appropriate period after their appointment.
The state of Rhineland-Palatinate and RPTU advocate a supervision concept in which a high level of presence of teaching staff at the university location is expected. In addition to the general employment requirements, the employment requirements set out in Section 49 of the Rhineland-Palatinate Higher Education Act apply.
RPTU stands for the diversity of all employees. We welcome applications from all interested parties, regardless of their ethnic and social origin, age, religion, gender, disability and sexual orientation or identity. Severely disabled persons and persons with equivalent status will be given preference if they are suitably qualified and suitable (please enclose proof of severe disability/equal status with your application).
RPTU strives to increase the proportion of women in areas in which women are underrepresented. Applications from female and male scientists from abroad are expressly encouraged.
Your application:
Applicants must specify in their cover letter for which of the two professorships they want to apply. Applying for both professorships is possible if significant achievements have been made in both fields or in overlapping areas.
Applications should be submitted online at: https://jobs.rptu.de no later than deadline: 22.06.2025. Applications should include
● a cover letter (1-2 pages overview of your motivation & suitability for the professorship),
● a curriculum vitae ,
● a full list of publications ,
● copies of your five most important publications ,
● your proposed research agenda (2-5 pages),
● a list of 4-6 references (with at least two references outside of your group of current and former collaborators),
● a teaching statement , and
● copies of relevant certificates and diplomas .
If you have any questions, please contact Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Michel ( sebastian.michel@cs.rptu.de ) .
