Do you want to understand and shape how professionals of all backgrounds can contribute to emergent futures of generative AI? Do you thrive on connecting and collaborating with a wide range of partners, putting participation and co-creation at the heart of your research work? Apply for this position for the opportunity to conduct design-led research on a major societal concern within an EU wide doctoral training network with university secondments.We are seeking a highly motivated doctoral candidate to join our research team as part of a prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) doctoral network: AlignAI. The AlignAI doctoral network aims to train doctoral candidates to develop, evaluate, and engage with Large Language Models (LLMs). It focuses on aligning these models with human values to ensure their development and deployment are ethically sound and socially beneficial. By integrating expertise from social sciences, humanities, and technical disciplines, the project will address critical issues such as explainability and fairness, thereby ensuring LLMs contribute positively to education, mental health, and news consumption.
In this position, the doctoral candidate will apply, evaluate and innovate
Key Enabling Methodologies (KEMs) for the influx of LLMs into every socio-economic sector, paying special attention to the diversity of agencies and intentionalities within the realities of LLMs deployed in socio-technical systems. The particular value of KEMs are that, while based in design, they are applicable by a wide range of people to approach challenges. In the context of AI usage in complex socio-technical systems (e.g., in education, news consumption, mental health), KEMs need to be elaborated carefully in order to ensure inclusivity of concerns and to reflect a diversity of agencies. Potential results of the doctoral research include the validation of existing KEMs and the creation of new likewise broadly accessible tools and strategies oriented at value-alignment of LLMs.
The doctoral candidate will need to apply methods from design-led and qualitative research to philosophy of technology, human-computer interaction, computer science, science and technology studies, innovation management, and/or related disciplines. They will also need to develop an appreciation of contemporary LLM applications as complex socio-technical systems. Thus, the ideal candidate will have an interdisciplinary background that spans several of the aforementioned disciplines, and that demonstrates a clear interest in AI technology and its societal impact. At the same time, the candidate will have the necessary language, communication, and analytic skills to produce research of publishable quality.
The doctoral candidate will be supervised by
Prof. Stephan Wensveen and Dr. Jesse Benjamin embedded within the cluster
Designing with Intelligence, Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Additional supervision will be provided within the AlignAI doctoral network by Prof. Daniel Gatica Perez (Digital Humanities, EPFL) and Professor Azzurra Ruggeri (Psychology, TU München). The candidate will be expected to contribute actively and positively to the design and AI research communities in Eindhoven, as well as to attend workshops, summer schools, and research visits at AlignAI partner institutions.
This position is one of four PhD positions being offered at TU/e through the AlignAI doctoral network, the others being in Human Technology Interaction (Martijn Willemsen) and Philosophy & Ethics group (Carlos Zednik).