PhD position « Human-AI Communication Planning »

Örebro University has an open position for a highly-motivated Ph.D. student interested in working on making artificial systems communicate efficiently with humans so that they can collaborate. The position is offered for a period of four years and is fully funded through the Swedish Research Council.

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ABOUT THE PROJECT:

The Ph.D. position is associated with a Swedish Research Council-funded project which aims to investigate how to develop artificial systems that can communicate with human teammates while considering human preferences and knowledge and adapting to different human users. More specifically, the project will address the following requirements identified for such a task: (1) proactivity: the agent should be able to detect a need for communication and execute a communication action without being explicitly prompted to do so, (2) adaptability: the agent should be able to adapt its communication actions to the user’s evolving state of knowledge and skills, and (3) multi-user support: the agent should be able to consider several human users and adapt its communication strategy to each of them. This project is by nature multi-disciplinary and draws from the fields of planning, human-AI interaction, and cognitive sciences.

The student is expected to extend existing work on automated planning, shared mental models, and human-AI interaction to obtain a framework for adaptive communication planning that reacts to context and accounts for human preferences and skills. The student is also expected to test and validate the obtained framework in experiments with virtual agents, real robots, and human participants. The research will be performed at Örebro University in a very active team dedicated to Cognitive Robotic Systems. Collaboration with international researchers is possible through the employer’s hosted professors network.