项目介绍

2025年4月27日

Creating scientific datasets that can be reused by others facilitates knowledge synthesis and discovery, but proves challenging, especially in teams with participants with various backgrounds and various levels of expertise. Methodologies for knowledge elicitation focus on human-human teams, whereas they can greatly benefit from using conversational AI agents for such tasks. This project investigates the role conversational AI agents can play in supporting communication in heterogeneous teams (e.g., scientists and engineers) with the aim of eliciting knowledge concerning the context of scientific datasets. Doing so, we create data specifications that match the needs of users and systems or algorithms using such datasets, thereby increasing their reuse.

We are looking for a PhD candidate to work on Hybrid Intelligence techniques for creating reusable datasets. You will explore data-centric research problems within and using AI solutions, addressing questions such as:

• How can we use conversational AI to support collaboration in heterogeneous teams?
• What are effective collaborative patterns for knowledge elicitation in heterogeneous teams for scientific data, with a focus on tacit knowledge?
• How can the quality of collaboration in hybrid heterogeneous teams be measured?

The PhD position will be jointly supervised by dr. Lise Stork and prof. Paul Groth from the Intelligent Data Engineering Lab  at the University of Amsterdam, and Davide Dell’Anna from the Responsible AI group at the University of Utrecht.

What are you going to do?

You are expected:

• to perform research
• to publish and present the results in international journals and leading conferences, and to write a PhD thesis
• to collaborate with the member of the research group involved
• contribute to our education activities as assistant to a course and/or guiding students in their thesis work

Our offer

A temporary contract for 38 hours per week for the duration of 4 years (the initial contract will be for a period of 18 months and after satisfactory evaluation it will be extended for a total duration of 4 years). The preferred starting date is as soon as possible. This should lead to a dissertation (PhD thesis). We will draft an educational plan that includes attendance of courses and (international) meetings. We also expect you to assist in teaching undergraduates and master students.

The gross monthly salary, based on 38 hours per week and dependent on relevant experience, ranges between € 2,901 to € 3,707 (scale P). UvA additionally offers an extensive package of secondary benefits, including 8% holiday allowance and a year-end bonus of 8.3%. The UFO profile ‘PhD candidate’ is applicable. A favourable tax agreement, the ‘30% ruling’, may apply to non-Dutch applicants. The Collective Labour Agreement of Universities of the Netherlands is applicable.

Besides the salary and a vibrant and challenging environment at Science Park we offer you multiple fringe benefits:

• 232 holiday hours per year (based on fulltime) and extra holidays between Christmas and 1 January;
• Multiple courses to follow from our Teaching and Learning Centre;
• A complete educational program for PhD students;
• Multiple courses on topics such as leadership for academic staff;
• Multiple courses on topics such as time management, handling stress and an online learning platform with 100+ different courses;
• 7 weeks birth leave (partner leave) with 100% salary;
• Partly paid parental leave;
• The possibility to set up a workplace at home;
• A pension at ABP for which UvA pays two third part of the contribution;
• The possibility to follow courses to learn Dutch;
• Help with housing for a studio or small apartment when you’re moving from abroad.

Are you curious to read more about our extensive package of secondary employment benefits, take a look here.

Where you will work

The mission of the Informatics Institute (IvI) is to perform curiosity-driven and use-inspired fundamental research in Computer Science. The main research themes are Artificial Intelligence, Computational Science and Systems and Network Engineering. Our research involves complex information systems at large, with a focus on collaborative, data driven, computational and intelligent systems, all with a strong interactive component.