PhD CIFRE: Advancing AI Ethics with Fairness and Explainability - F/M

What we offer

Our company culture is focused on helping our employees enable innovation by building breakthroughs together. How? We focus every day on building the foundation for tomorrow and creating a workplace that embraces differences, values flexibility, and is aligned to our purpose-driven and future-focused work. We offer a highly collaborative, caring team environment with a strong focus on learning and development, recognition for your individual contributions, and a variety of benefit options for you to choose from. Apply now!

What you'll do 
Are you passionate about advancing responsible AI? ith AI evolving at an unprecedented pace, addressing the associated risks is more critical than ever, especially those stemming from bias and discrimination. These challenges not only compromise fairness but can also hinder system performance. Explainability techniques provide essential insights by revealing hidden biases in decision-making, laying the groundwork for effective interventions. This PhD position offers you the opportunity to tackle these challenges head-on, ensuring that AI systems operate reliably and equitably. In this role, you will:

• Develop advanced bias assessment techniques that leverage explainability to identify and understand bias sources.

• Design innovative methods that integrate explainability tools to measure bias throughout AI deployment and support targeted mitigation.

• Combine explainability and fairness metrics to generate actionable, data-driven insights for refining AI decision-making.

• Collaborate with experts in machine learning and responsible AI, leveraging state-of-the-art resources to bridge research with industry applications.

What you bring 

• Graduate in MSc or Engineering degree in Data Science, Machine Learning, or a related field.

• Familiarity with model interpretability, causal inference, or counterfactual reasoning. 

• Previous experience in AI explainability/fairness is advantageous.

• Demonstrated expertise in machine/deep learning.

• Proficiency in research methodologies: literature review, experimental design, and data analysis.

• Excellent Python programming skills, experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g. PyTorch, TensorFlow, Scikit-Learn).

• Knowledge of version control and containerization tools (e.g. Git, Docker).

• Strong analytical skills, creativity, passion for addressing societal challenges of AI.

• Fluent in English (wokring language), excellent written/verbal communication.

Contract: CIFRE

Duration: 3 years
Start date: as soon as possible

Remuneration: according to the conditions fixed by the French Minister of Higher Education and Research

Before applying, please check that you meet the requirements for CIFRE here: Cifre_english_2024.pdf

Meet your team 
Be part of the AI Ethics – Operationalization team, which is situated in the SAP Business AI unit. In close collaboration with experts and teams across SAP, we translate the AI Ethics principles and requirements, as outlined in the AI Ethics Policy, into hands-on guidance for teams developing AI systems at SAP that are compliant with responsible AI and AI ethics requirements.

We are SAP

SAP innovations help more than 400,000 customers worldwide work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively. Originally known for leadership in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, SAP has evolved to become a market leader in end-to-end business application software and related services for database, analytics, intelligent technologies, and experience management. As a cloud company with 200 million users and more than 100,000 employees worldwide, we are purpose-driven and future-focused, with a highly collaborative team ethic and commitment to personal development. Whether connecting global industries, people, or platforms, we help ensure every challenge gets the solution it deserves. At SAP, we build breakthroughs, together.

Our inclusion promise

SAP’s culture of inclusion, focus on health and well-being, and flexible working models help ensure that everyone – regardless of background – feels included and can run at their best. At SAP, we believe we are made stronger by the unique capabilities and qualities that each person brings to our company, and we invest in our employees to inspire confidence and help everyone realize their full potential. We ultimately believe in unleashing all talent and creating a better and more equitable world.

SAP is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to the values of Equal Employment Opportunity and provide accessibility accommodations to applicants with physical and/or mental disabilities. If you are interested in applying for employment with SAP and are in need of accommodation or special assistance to navigate our website or to complete your application, please send an e-mail with your request to Recruiting Operations Team: Americas: Careers.NorthAmerica@sap.com or Careers.LatinAmerica@sap.com, APJ: Careers.APJ@sap.com, EMEA: Careers@sap.com.

EOE AA M/F/Vet/Disability:

Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to their age, race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, age, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, et al), sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, protected veteran status, or disability.

Successful candidates might be required to undergo a background verification with an external vendor.

 Requisition ID:410989 | Work Area: Software-Research | Expected Travel: 0 - 10% | Career Status: Student | Employment Type: Limited Full Time  | Additional Locations: