UNIMORE joins ELLE, the new MSCA Doctoral Network on secure and safe AI

The University of Modena and Reggio Emilia is a partner of ELLE – European Doctoral Network on Secure and Safe Artificial Intelligence in the Age of Foundation Models, a new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network funded by the European Commission under Horizon Europe (HORIZON-MSCA-2025-DN). Coordinated by the University of Cagliari, ELLE will train 15 doctoral candidates over four years, with an EU contribution of about €4.5 million.

ELLE aims to train a new generation of AI scientists and professionals who will reinforce European leadership in secure and safe AI. The network tackles four challenges that hinder the deployment of foundation models in compliance with the EU AI Act: technical robustness and safety, privacy and data governance, interpretability and transparency, and continual adaptation in security-sensitive and safety-critical settings. The training programme combines multidisciplinary PhD projects with joint supervision and secondments, open courses and workshops, and a strong focus on mobility and knowledge transfer.

The consortium brings together the University of Cagliari, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, the University of Helsinki, Lancaster University, the Computer Vision Center, the Universities of Genoa, Pisa and Modena and Reggio Emilia, and INRIA, together with associated partners including KU Leuven, the University of Oxford, the ELLIS Institute Tübingen, the Max Planck Society, Valeo and Nokia. ELLE is supported by the ELLIS Society and stems from the ELSA European Network of Excellence.

At UNIMORE, the doctoral project “Trustworthy and interpretable vision foundation models”, hosted at AImageLab, will develop foundation models for vision and multimodal interaction that are safe to use, aware of NSFW content and interpretable by design, exploring selective fine-tuning, embedding space reorganisation and unlearning in Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces. The doctoral candidate will spend research periods at Lancaster University, CISPA and Valeo.

Stay tuned for the call for the doctoral position!