This 2-year long post-doc research position aims to explore novel and advanced forms of personalization in designing behaviour change support systems for children users. The project shall extend current approaches to persuasion profiling, where persuasion strategy is adapted to an individual's personality, in two ways: First, it will seek child-appropriate ways of creating persuasion profiles, addressing issues related to their developing cognition, ethics, and making such solutions engaging. Second, it will seek to account for intra-personal variation across contexts and situations. Depending on the interests of the post-doc research we shall address specific behavior change challenges for children in areas relating to learning and rehabilitation.

Next to addressing the research challenge above they will be contributing to the department's efforts to develop relevant stakeholder networks and track record in this field.

Background

In rehabilitation behavior change is a key element to ensuring adherence and the effectiveness of therapy. For example, encouraging a rehabilitating patient to take a walk which might be beneficial for their well-being and vitality, and will be more efficient if a personalized model of context is taken into account for choosing which behaviour change strategy to apply. Similarly in education increasing children's motivation, or perseverance during studying/practice may be key to achieving higher learning outcomes.

Currently, persuasion profiling has addressed healthy adult users only. Applying this technique to vulnerable populations who stand most to benefit from behavior change programs (e.g. consider rehabilitating children), demands higher attention to allowing users to make the personalization approach engaging, protecting their privacy and ensuring a meaningful and relevant management of the profiling behavior of the system. Ensuring intelligibility and accountability of persuasion profiling for vulnerable individuals presents complex design and ethical challenges. Our intended scientific contribution pertains both to the specific solutions as well as the design research methodology used.

The project shall be carried out in the Future Everyday research group of the department of industrial design. Future Everyday aims at bridging the gap between emerging technologies and people's everyday life: how to deal with uncertainties that come naturally with new and still evolving technologies, and how to translate them into meaningful products, systems and services that seamlessly blend into everyday life.  

During the project, the candidate will work closely with the project team, Panos Markopoulos, Emilia Barakova and Javed Vassilis Khan, and will seek collaborations in and outside the department.

The candidate should hold a PhD in related topics, e.g., persuasion technology, interaction design and children, recommender systems, adaptive user interfaces, artificial intelligence, etc. Experience in the field of personal health monitoring solutions, wearable, assistive, and rehabilitation technologies will be very much valued. The candidate should demonstrate an affinity for working and designing with people, aspiring to combine an innovative hands-on approach with a scientific grounding and insight, and empathy towards patients.

The candidate should have (and will develop further in this project) strong professional and communication skills in order to work together with remote partners in a multi-national and multi-disciplinary research team.  The candidate should be fluent in spoken and written English; fluency in Dutch will weigh positively to facilitate field-work with children and domain experts.

• Starting: early fall of 2019 (negotiable)
• A full-time temporary appointment for a period of 2 years
• A gross monthly salary between € 3.255 and € 4.274 (on a full-time basis), depending on experience and knowledge
• A yearly holiday allowance of 8% of the yearly salary
• A yearly end-of-year allowance of 8.3% of the yearly salary
• Excellent employment conditions (including excellent sport facilities and child care).