Job description

One of the most pressing matters that holds back robots from taking on more tasks and reach a widespread deployment in society is their limited ability to understand human communication and take situation-appropriate actions. This PhD positions is dedicated to addressing this gap by developing the underlying data-driven models that enable a robot to engage with humans in a socially aware manner.

This position is specifically targeted at the development of an argumentative dialogue system for human-robot interaction.  The PhD candidate will explore how to fuse multimodal behaviour to infer a person's perspective. The candidate will use, and further develop, reinforcement learning techniques in order to drive the robot's argumentative strategy for deliberating topics of current social importance such as global warming or vaccination.

The ideal candidate will have a keen interest in speech technology and reinforcement learning. He or she has strong interactive system background will design and run the experiments to evaluate the created hybrid-AI models through human-robot interaction.

Topics of interest:

1) long-term human-robot interaction

2) affective computing

2) NLP&argument-mining

Requirements

• MSc in Computer Science or related field.
• At least 3 years of programming experience in python (java  or C++is a plus).
• Motivation to meet deadlines.
• Affinitty to design and social science research.
• Interest in collaborating with colleagues from Industrial Design.
• Willingness to teach and guide students.
• The ability to work in a team, take initiative, be results oriented and systematic.