Do you have a strong technical background (in information systems and AI) and do you want to address a key societal challenge? Then join LIFTS, our large-scale research project that aims to deliver personalized health promotion tools tailored for school children who face challenges in living a healthy life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx4QW4FmVs4. In particular, join a new team of four PhD students, across three Dutch universities, who collaborate with co-design partners, including at least four schools for children with mild intellectual disabilities.

Your PhD focus will be technically oriented, focusing on developing novel techniques to support digital health interventions. The interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of the project will enable complementing insights derived from AI techniques with insights from social sciences, to be able to meet the target group's needs and wishes for digital health interventions.  Wearable trackers and AI are likely to be used in the context of digital twin-based personalization, which will raise interesting challenges at the side of deserving, gaining, and preserving the trust of parents, privacy officers, etc.

Your PhD project will specifically focus on developing an evidence-based framework to deliver personalized and adaptive recommendations to participants, with the aim of improving their adherence to the intervention and optimizing its effectiveness. Different participants are likely to have different habits and preferences, for instance, regarding eating and physical activity behaviors. We expect that taking these differences into account will lead to more effective recommendations tailored to the participants. Personalization will also be explored at the level of preferences for behavior change strategies (e.g., social, competitive, or health education-related), since prior studies have indicated great variability in such preferences.

We aim to deliver interpretable end-to-end participant routine models able to capture the rich personal time related patterns that may help understand barriers or drivers for, e.g., physical activity.  For that, we will leverage and extend state-of-the art process mining techniques. We aim at the dynamic training of human digital twins, to personalize and adapt interventions. In particular, you will develop methods for nudging the participants at the most appropriate moment, taking also context such as school schedules into account.

With regards to data collection and management, we will adopt the most recent architectural solutions fulfilling the FAIR principles and implementing a privacy by design approach, to ensure a transparent and responsible management of the collected data in line with the GDPR.

You will be standing on the shoulders of giants, receiving full access to state-of-the-art tools such as GameBus.eu, Experiencer.eu, and  SciModeler (https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-022-01444-y), but also scripts and AI libraries developed by your Eindhoven peers. You will be supported by a scientific programmer, but you should also be technically proficient and pro-active on the engineering side (programming, systematic testing, git collaboration, database interactions).

You will receive free access to PhD-level courses and summer schools and we have a sound budget for sharing your research results at top scientific venues. Throughout your 4-year project, you aim at publishing roughly one journal and one conference paper per year. Many such papers will be supplemented by software demonstrators. Ultimately, you will share your key accumulated knowledge in a PhD dissertation.

• A master's degree (or an equivalent academic degree) in Information Systems, Software Engineering, Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, or a related discipline.
• A research-oriented attitude (accountable, visionary, ethical, collaborative, curious, …).
• An engineering-oriented attitude (can-do, will-build, has-tested, …).
• Affinity with web development tools (APIs, databases, at least one front-end framework).
• Eagerness to work in an interdisciplinary team and a multi-stakeholder project.
• Excellent communications skills.
• Good skills for planning, pro-active monitoring and strategic pivoting.
• Fluent in spoken and written English (C1 level).
• Professional working proficiency of Dutch is a plus, but can be compensated when excelling technically and collaborating well with the other PhD candidates.

A meaningful job in a dynamic and ambitious university, in an interdisciplinary setting and within an international network. You will work on a beautiful, green campus within walking distance of the central train station. In addition, we offer you:

• Full-time employment for four years, with an intermediate evaluation (go/no-go) after nine months. You will spend 10% of your employment on teaching tasks.
• Salary and benefits (such as a pension scheme, paid pregnancy and maternity leave, partially paid parental leave) in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities, scale P (min. €2,770 max. €3,539).
• A year-end bonus of 8.3% and annual vacation pay of 8%.
• High-quality training programs and other support to grow into a self-aware, autonomous scientific researcher. At TU/e we challenge you to take charge of your own learning process.
• An excellent technical infrastructure, on-campus children's day care and sports facilities.
• An allowance for commuting, working from home and internet costs.
• A Staff Immigration Team and a tax compensation scheme (the 30% facility) for international candidates.