We are looking for a PhD student who is interested in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Human-Robot Interaction.  The doctoral student will work in a newly funded project at the  Department of Speech, Music and Hearing within the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at KTH. The project is financed by the Swedish AI-program WASP (Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program) which offers a graduate school with research visits, partner universities, and visiting lecturers.

The newly started project is titled 'Anticipatory Control in Conversational Human-Robot Interaction'. The aim of the project is to use self-supervised learning to develop generic language models for human-robot interaction and explore how such models can be used in real time to predict and anticipate human behavior and thereby improve the interaction. Whereas traditional language models in NLP (such as BERT, GPT) have focused on written language, we want to model multi-modal conversation, where aspects such as engagement, turn-taking, and incremental processing are of importance. This means that the models will have to process both text, audio and video, including aspects such as how the human users move and their facial expressions.

In collaboration with industry and other projects, we will then explore how such models can be used for social robotic applications. Another important focus will be on model analysis and visualization.

For more information about the position, see https://www.kth.se/en/om/work-at-kth/lediga-jobb/what:job/jobID:623390/where:4/

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact Prof. Gabriel Skantze

(skantze@kth.se)