[iva] Two vacancies for PhD candidates to develop and evaluate conversational AI agents

[E.J. Krahmer]

[apologies for multiple postings]

We are announcing two vacancies for PhD candidates:
(1) to develop and evaluate personalized conversational AI-agents (at Tilburg University, https://bit.ly/334yskx), and
(2) to test the social effects of these agents (at Utrecht University, https://bit.ly/3ffYBSa).

These vacancies are part of a fully funded, 4-year project: “Smooth Operator. Development and effects of personalized conversational AI”. Since organizations invest in AI to improve customer service but users perceive chat conversations as unnatural and employees struggle with collaborating with AI, this project aims to develop personalized AI-agents based on conversational norms of human communication.

Although the PhD candidates will work on related but different sub-projects, a close collaboration is important for successful completion of the project. The first position is hosted at the Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication (TiCC), and will be supervised by dr. Christine Liebrecht and dr. Emiel van Miltenburg (daily supervision) and prof. dr. Emiel Krahmer (promotor). The second PhD project will be hosted at Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS (UiL OTS) (dr. Charlotte van Hooijdonk and prof. dr. Hans Hoeken) in collaboration with VU University Amsterdam (dr. Florian Kunneman and prof. dr. Hedwig te Molder). Moreover, eight private partners are involved (AI developers and conversation designers, companies that use AI in their customer service).

Both PhD projects are expected to start in Spring 2021; the exact starting date is negotiable (but no later than April 1).

Candidates for these positions should have a (research) master’s degree in:
- Either closely related to computational approaches (computational linguistics, data science, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, cognitive science, or comparable) and (demonstrable) affinity with communication science and linguistics;
- Or a field closely related to communication science (communication science, communication and information sciences, (applied) linguistics, (media) psychology, or comparable) and (demonstrable) affinity with language technology and computational techniques.

Deadline for application: project (1) 7 December, project (2) 18 December. For more information about the vacancies, please see the URLs listed above.
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