Postdoctoral Researcher in Archaelogy and AI

Postdoctoral Researcher in Archaelogy and AI

Category: Academic Staff & Researchers

1 - Working at the VUB

For more than 50 years, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel has stood for freedom, equality and solidarity, and this is very much alive on our campuses among students and staff alike.

At the VUB, you will find a diverse collection of personalities: innovators pur sang, but above all people who are 100% their authentic selves. With some 4,000 employees, we are the largest Dutch-speaking employer, in the private sector, in Brussels; an international city with which we are only too happy to connect and where (around) our 4 campuses are located.

Add to this our principle of free research - in which self-reflection, a critical attitude and an open, creative mind around scientific and social issues are central - and you have a university that is fundamentally groundbreaking and pioneering in education and research. In short: the VUB all over again.

Moreover, the VUB is a member of EUTOPIA, an alliance of like-minded European universities, all ready to reinvent themselves.

TheFaculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte, Department History, Archeology, Arts, Philosophy and Ethics, Research Group Archaeology, Environmental changes and GeoChemistryis looking for a postdoctoral researcher with a grant.

Join the VUB AMGC team (Archaeology, Environmental changes and Geo-Chemistry) and the FLAIR research group (Federated Labs AI and Robotics) for the ARCHAI project, which explores the crossover between artificial intelligence and Archaeological Prospection.

Archaeological prospection faces an unusual combination of challenges: data are sparse and unevenly distributed, observations are uncertain, and decisions about where to survey unfold sequentially under significant time and cost constraints. Existing predictive models provide useful but incomplete support because they cannot fully capture the complexity and heterogeneity of archaeological data. This underscores the need for approaches that explicitly capture uncertainty, adapt dynamically to new information, and sequentially optimise survey strategies in a transparent and robust manner.

ARCHAI, a new fully funded interdisciplinary research project of the VUB, introduces a new research framework that treats archaeological prospection as a sequential decision-making process explored through computational simulation and deep multi-objective reinforcement learning. The project will investigate a simulation platform that reproduces the structure of real prospection activities by integrating multiple, heterogeneous geospatial and archaeological data layers. Within this environment, we will design and evaluate new reinforcement learning algorithms capable of operating in large, partially observed spatial domains to infer efficient, interpretable strategies for estimating archaeological potential, that capture distinct criteria including scientific yield and cost effectiveness. These strategies will then be tested in real field settings (e.g. Turkey, Cyprus and Flanders) to assess how well simulation-trained decision policies transfer to practical archaeological contexts.

The initiative combines the AMGC group's extensive expertise in archaeological prospection with the FLAIR's strengths in developing new multi-objective deep reinforcement learning algorithms, to support decision makers under uncertainty.

VUB team:Prof. dr. Ralf Vandam (AMGC), Prof. dr. Pieter Libin (FLAIR)

Within the ARCHAI project, you will coordinate the collaboration between the archaeological (AMGC) and AI (FLAIR) teams, contributing to the development of a simulator of real-world archaeological search processes and to the AI methods that learn effective discovery strategies within it. You will combine archaeological and landscape data (maps, satellite imagery, archaeological datasets) with machine learning approaches to build a system that highlights promising locations for archaeological research. You are also expected to play an active role in project coordination and in writing follow-up grant applications to expand the research.

Your key responsibilities:

• Co-coordinate the ARCHAI project, ensuring close collaboration between the AMGC and FLAIR teams
• Contribute to the development of machine learning methods for archaeological predictive modelling / site discovery
• Contribute to the design of the archaeological search-process simulator used to train and evaluate AI methods
• Write grant applications to extend and expand this line of research
• Take an active part in AMGC and FLAIR activities (attend regular meetings) and work closely with all members of both teams (PIs, PhDs, and postdocs)
• (Help with) supervising MSc and BSc theses related to the