The Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence department at Tilburg University is looking for three enthusiastic colleagues for PhD positions on the project VIBE (Virtual Humans in the Brabant Economy). This project aims to develop embodied conversational agents in virtual reality that look and behave like humans both verbally and non-verbally and can be deployed in hospital settings. Together with 13 partners, including Tilburg University, universities of applied sciences, several technology firms, the Netherlands Aerospace Center, and three hospitals, we will build these agents for virtual, mixed and augmented reality environments, train these agents using sensing technologies and data science techniques, and deploy and test the agents in three hospitals that partner in this project.

The €7 million four-year project has been funded by OP Zuid, European Union, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the province of Noord-Brabant. On this ambitious project Tilburg University will hire three PhD candidates to work in an interdisciplinary team of knowledge institutions, corporate partners and hospitals. PhD candidates should excel in areas directly related to the project, such as dialogue management; speech recognition & speech synthesis; computational linguistics & machine learning; and recognizing & synthesizing non-verbal communication.

The positions we are advertising are for four years fulltime. The PhD student will be an academic member of the department, will publish in journals and conference proceedings, and will generally support the VIBE research project s/he is part of, including strengthening the ties between knowledge institutions, corporate partners and hospitals.

The successful PhD candidate holds a (research) master in a relevant area and is expected to have an academic mindset with an entrepreneurial interest, and is supposed to be enthusiastic, creative, and solution-driven. The candidate is comfortable with working in a multidisciplinary research team, has an excellent command of English and good professional communication skills. Specifically, the candidate has a strong background in areas such as cognitive science, computer science, data science, engineering, computational linguistics and virtual, mixed or augmented reality.

Fixed-term contract: 4 years.

The selected candidates will start with a contract for one year, which – upon a positive outcome of the evaluation – will continue in a contract for the remaining three years. The selected candidate is expected to have written a PhD thesis by the end of the contract (which may be based on publications).

Tilburg University is rated among the top of Dutch employers and has excellent terms of employment. The collective labor agreement of Dutch University applies. The PhD candidates will be ranked in the Dutch university job ranking system (UFO) as a PhD-student (promovendus) with a starting salary of € 2,222 gross per month in the first year, up to € 2,840 in the fourth year (amounts fulltime).

The university offers very good fringe benefits, such as a holiday allowance of 8% and an end-of-year bonus of 8.3% (annually), an options model for terms and conditions of employment and reimbursement of moving expenses. Tilburg University provides support in finding accommodation (for foreign employees). Candidates from outside the Netherlands may qualify for a (temporary) tax-free allowance equal to 30% of their taxable salary. The university will apply for such an allowance on their behalf.

Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences

Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences (TSHD) conducts scientific research and education in the fields of Communication and Information Sciences, Philosophy, Religious studies and Language and Culture studies. The School of Humanities features three departments, several research institutes and a faculty office. Each year around 275 students commence a Bachelor or (Pre) Master Program. The School has approximately 1300 students and 250 employees.

Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences

The School and the department

The Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence department at Tilburg University is part of the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences. The department emphasizes innovative cutting-edge research in those areas of cognitive science that bring together psychological and computational theories and methodologies. The group is responsible for the Bachelor and the Master program Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence, is co-responsible for the university-wide data science Master program Data Science & Society, and is affiliated with the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (http://www.jads.nl). Researchers in the Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence track have access to computer clusters, experimental lab facilities, and the virtual and mixed reality DAF Technology Lab and its sensing technologies (https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/campus/experiencing-virtual-reality/) . Moreover, researchers play an important role in Mind Labs (http://www.mind-labs.eu), an initiative that fosters collaborations between knowledge institutions and corporations in the field of interactive technologies and behavior.