Are you passionate about AI, sustainability, and transdisciplinary research? Would you like to bring together AI techniques and stakeholder insights to create transparent decision-support tools for tackling sustainable mobility challenges faced by businesses, governments and citizens?
InformationThis PhD project is a part of The
DECIDE project
– Democratizing AI: Empowering Citizens through Transparent Decision-making. DECIDE is a large-scale, NWO-funded research initiative under the Dutch Research Agenda (NWA). It brings together
10 Dutch universities, over
50 academic researchers, and
30 societal partners in an ambitious inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration. Our shared mission is to design and implement a new generation of
transparent, citizen-empowering AI systems, with a focus on
AI-supported decision-making that contributes to
the empowerment and democratic participation of citizens.
The DECIDE project addresses real-world challenges across domains such as
healthcare, mobility, public governance, and healthy lifestyles. By co-developing strategies with societal stakeholders, DECIDE aims to create solutions that have tangible impact on society.
As a PhD candidate, you will be part of a
multidisciplinary team of PhD students and become part of a
vibrant inter- and transdisciplinary research community. You will:
- Collaborate across disciplines and with societal stakeholders to achieve real-world impact.
- Participate in joint training programs on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research methods, citizen engagement, and ethical AI.
- Contribute to cutting-edge research that bridges theory and practice.
DECIDE is organized into
10 work packages (WPs):
- SixWPs focus on disciplinary perspectives in psychology, education, computer sciences, law, and philosophy.
- FourWPs address citizen-empowerment-scenarios (CES) in healthcare, mobility, public governance, and healthy living.
This PhD project focuses on the
development of transparent and explainable AI-based Decision Support Systems (AI-DSS) for sustainable mobility, in close collaboration with societal partners SmartwayZ (
https://smartwayz.nl/). The aim is to empower citizens, particularly SMEs, entrepreneurs, and policy makers, by enabling them to understand, explore, and evaluate the consequences of mobility-related policy and business decisions.
The PhD project explicitly combines
computational modelling and AI techniques with
social science research methods to 1) develop AI-based simulation and decision-support models, and 2) empirically investigate how different stakeholders (e.g. SMEs, entrepreneurs, policy makers) understand, use, and are empowered by such systems, by actively participating in stakeholder workshops, interviews, surveys, and case studies.
This position will be based in the Information Systems (IS) Group at the Department of Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). The candidate will be supervised by Dr. Yingqian Zhang, Dr. Hendrik Baier, and Dr. Plato Leung.
The Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences (IE&IS) department combines disciplinary knowledge from the humanities, social sciences and technical sciences to solve the complex problems of industries and society. We collaboratively focus on and create responsible and effective innovations for the research themes: Humans and Technology, Supply Chain Management, Sustainability and Circularity, and Value of Data-Driven Intelligence.