UTU-Outokumpu summer internship on AI for stainless steel manufacturing

The Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering is now looking for a Research Assistant to join the Materials Informatics Laboratory group of Prof. Milica Todorović on the collaborative project with Outokumpu Oy and their data science team in the Enterprise Intelligence Platforms.

The research can be carried out in conjunction with studies and is suitable for summer internship work. In this position, you will have a chance to make an impact by applying tools from artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the quality of stainless steel during a hot-rolling manufacturing process.

Project topic. This summer, you will be working on e.g. sensor data on the process, thickness profiles and process parameters, with 1,000s of datapoints per coil collected in a factory setting. Our objective is to implement a customised AI strategy to detect coil defects, understand how processing conditions affect defect creation and establish which combination of processing parameters minimises defect occurrence.

Your experience and ambitions. We welcome candidates with a degree in physics, materials science, chemistry, computer science or engineering, who are passionate about data science and applied AI in natural sciences. Prior experience with materials simulations, spectroscopy, coding and data science is a bonus. We seek colleagues who enjoy coding, scripting and analytics, and are keen to push the boundaries of computational chemistry. These projects require creative thinking and programming as well as a broad understanding of the atomistic structures and functional properties of materials. We further appreciate willingness to travel, teach and mentor, collaborate and communicate science.

Requirements. We welcome student candidates from physics, chemistry, materials science, computer science or engineering who are curious about applied AI in natural sciences. The candidates should have their BSc. degree ready before start of the work. Prior programming experience is necessary, while machine learning experience is a bonus, but not a must. We seek colleagues who enjoy coding, scripting and analytics, and are keen to push the boundaries of AI applications to materials processing and manufacturing.

Practical details. The position will be shared between the UTU Materials Engineering Unit in Turku and Outokumpu in Helsinki. The contract will be made directly with Outokumpu, with a monthly salary of 2,570€, which includes the costs of travel. The starting time for this position would be 01.06.2025, or upon mutual agreement. The contract duration will be 3 months from the starting time, with a trial period of 6 weeks. Pending successful outcomes, project is extendable to 6 months in total and would be suitable for MSc thesis work. We particularly encourage applications from candidates willing to carry out project tasks to earn academic credits as part of their study plan.

Ready to apply? Please follow the Application URL link.
Deadline is 27 April 2026 at 16:00h.

Tagged as: artificial intelligence, big data, coding, data analytics, industrial manufacturing, machine learning, materials defects, materials science, stainless steel, supervised learning