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<div style="text-align: center;" class=""><b class=""><font
class="" size="4">PhD fellowship</font></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;" class=""><b class=""><br
class="">
</b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;" class=""><i class=""><font
class="" size="4">Towards a Computational Model of
Social Skills for Human-Computer Interaction</font></i></div>
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class="" size="4"><br class="">
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<div style="text-align: center;" class=""><a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.lis-lab.fr/">LIS</a>,
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.lpl-aix.fr/">LPL</a>,
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.ilcb.fr/">ILCB</a>,
Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS</div>
<br>
<div class="">>>> Deadline for application: <b
class="">June 3rd, 2019</b> <br>
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The goal of this project is to develop a computational model
of social skills for multimodal interaction systems. The model
will focus more precisely on a specific context, task oriented
dialogues, in which all semantic and pragmatic aspects are
controlled. It will be built by means on different machine
learning methodologies applied to the analysis of natural
corpora. This work will be part of an ongoing project (<a
href="http://www.lpl-aix.fr/%7Eacorformed/" class=""
moz-do-not-send="true">http://www.lpl-aix.fr/~acorformed/</a>),
aiming at developing a virtual reality system for training
doctors to break bad news, with an embodied conversational
agent playing the role of a virtual patient.
<div class="">
<div class=""><br class="">
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<div class="">The PhD is organized around 4 main tasks: <br
class="">
<ul class="">
<li class="">Describing the social skills relevant to
the use case, with a specific focus on empathy and
persuasion, through a corpus analysis. This task is
done in collaboration with doctors involved in such
training activities.</li>
<li class="">Modeling the social skills, by means of
machine learning techniques</li>
<li class="">Implementing the social skills in the
communication environment</li>
<li class="">Developing a tool for the automatic
evaluation of doctor's skills, adapted to the training
goals</li>
</ul>
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<div class="">The PhD candidate should have a master's
degree completed in one of the fields below:<br class="">
<ul class="">
<li class="">Computer science</li>
<li class="">Artificial Intelligence</li>
<li class="">Natural language processing</li>
<li class="">Applied mathematics</li>
</ul>
The candidate should have a strong background in machine
learning and modeling methods. Some complementary previous
experience would be appreciated in the following topics:<br
class="">
<ul class="">
<li class="">Human-computer interaction</li>
<li class="">Multimodal data processing</li>
<li class="">Data acquisition</li>
<li class="">Corpus-based studies</li>
<li class="">Affective computing</li>
<li class="">Conversational agents</li>
</ul>
<br class="">
This fellowship is part of the ILCB action (<a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.ilcb.fr/call-for-applications/phd-grants/"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.ilcb.fr/call-for-applications/phd-grants/</a>).
It is a three-year work contract, with a monthly net
salary of approximately 1685€/month, and a financial
support for international research training and
conferences participations plus a contribution to the
research costs.</div>
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</div>
<div class="">French language is not required.<br>
<br>
Aix Marseille University (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.univ-amu.fr/en" moz-do-not-send="true">http://www.univ-amu.fr/en</a>),
the largest French University, is ideally located on the
Mediterranean coast, and only 1h30 away from the Alps.<br>
<br>
The application files consists of the following documents:<br>
- A detailed curriculum,<br>
- A description of the academic background and copy of
academic records and most recent diploma,<br>
- A cover letter describing why the applicant wishes to
participate in this project and his/her research’s
adequacy with the proposed topics<br>
- if possible, recommendation letters (including one from
the master or equivalent diploma supervisor)<br>
<br>
</div>
<div class="">
<div class="">For any question, contact Philippe Blache
<<a href="mailto:philippe.blache@univ-amu.fr"
class="" moz-do-not-send="true">philippe.blache@univ-amu.fr</a>>
or Magalie Ochs <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E"
href="mailto:magalie.ochs@lis-lab.fr"
moz-do-not-send="true"><magalie.ochs@lis-lab.fr
></a></div>
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