In this project, several teams (clinical centers, serious game developers, and academic institutions) combine their multidisciplinary skills to create and deploy a solution for rehabilitating patients having visual impairments by offering them training scenarios using a virtual reality (VR) setup.

Your job
The Visualisation and Graphics group within the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University (UU) is offering a four-year PhD position in Visual Analytics for Explainable Visual Rehabilitation. Research is conducted in close collaboration with the SMARTneurolab at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Department of Experimental Psychology. This position is part of a set of vacancies in the NWO-funded project VR4eVR: Virtual Reality for Enriched Visual Rehabilitation.

As PhD candidate in this project, you will conduct independent, high-quality research resulting in a doctoral dissertation. Your research will focus on designing a Visual Analytics solution to analyse data from rehabilitating patients with hemianopsia (partial blindness). With the support of explainable AI models, you will develop Visual Analytics dashboards for exploring complex data recorded from the training patients including eye tracking, task progress, and success rates. By quantifying model uncertainty, these dashboards will enable therapists to monitor and improve patients’ visual rehabilitation progress. You will collaborate with a diverse project team of academics, clinicians, and software developers to realize the goals of the project.

We are looking for an enthousiastic new colleague who meets several or all of the following criteria:

• Education: a Master's degree in Computer Science or related field, with the ability and willingness to learn new skills as required for the PhD project.
• Data Visualisation: demonstrable experience with data visualisation and building visual analytics dashboards, using a number of appropriate programming languages (e.g., Python, JavaScript), frontend frameworks (e.g., Svelte, Vue), and visualisation libraries (e.g., D3, Vega).
• Background: a solid background in visualisation, visual analytics, machine learning, and explainable AI, including related math and statistics concepts.
• Research: demonstrable interest, motivation, and enthousiasm for independent and team-based scientific research, including collaborative software development.
• Data Science: experience that demonstrates you are able to work in an applied data science context (e.g., collecting, formatting, cleaning, and analysing large amounts of complex data).
• Communication: excellent spoken and written English communication and interpersonal skills, knowledge of spoken and written Dutch is an advantage.

We offer:

• a position for four years (1.0 FTE);
• a gross monthly salary between €2,872 and €3,670 in the case of full-time employment (salary scale P under the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities (CAO NU));
• 8% holiday pay and 8.3% year-end bonus;
• a pension scheme, partially paid parental leave and flexible terms of employment based on the CAO NU.

In addition to the terms of employment laid down in the CAO NU, Utrecht University has a number of schemes and facilities of its own for employees. This includes schemes facilitating professional development, leave schemes and schemes for sports and cultural activities, as well as discounts on software and other IT products. We also offer access to additional employee benefits through our Terms of Employment Options Model. In this way, we encourage our employees to continue to invest in their growth. For more information, please visit Working at Utrecht University.

Universiteit Utrecht

A better future for everyone. This ambition motivates our scientists in executing their leading research and inspiring teaching. At Utrecht University, the various disciplines collaborate intensively towards major strategic themes. Our focus is on Dynamics of Youth, Institutions for Open Societies, Life Sciences and Pathways to Sustainability. Sharing science, shaping tomorrow.

Working at the Faculty of Science means bringing together inspiring people across disciplines and with a variety of perspectives and backgrounds. The Faculty has six departments: Biology, Pharmaceutical Sciences, Information & Computing Sciences, Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. Together, we work on excellent research and inspiring education. We do so, driven by curiosity and supported by outstanding infrastructure. Visit us on LinkedIn and discover how you can become part of our community.

You will join the Visualisation and Graphics group at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences. You will be working closely with other members in this research group, other research groups within and outside of the faculty, and project partners from outside of Utrecht University. As the research topic has connections with medicine, data science, and game development, this allows for many interdisciplinary collaborations.

For more information, please contact Dr Angelos Chatzimparmpas at a.chatzimparmpas@uu.nl.

Do you have a question about the application procedure? Please send an email to science.recruitment@uu.nl.