The Social and Affective Computing group at the Utrecht University Department of Information and Computing Sciences is looking for a PhD candidate to conduct research on explainable and accountable affective computing for mental healthcare scenarios. The five-year position includes 70% research time and 30% teaching time. The post presents an excellent opportunity to develop an academic profile as a competent researcher and able teacher.

Affective computing has great potential for clinician support systems, but it needs to produce insightful, explainable, and accountable results. Cross-corpus and cross-task generalization of approaches, as well as efficient and effective ways of leveraging multimodality are some of the main challenges in the field. Furthermore, data are scarce, and class-imbalance is expected. While addressing these issues, precision needs to be complemented by interpretability. Potential investigation areas include for example depression, bipolar disorder, and dementia.

The PhD candidate is expected to bridge the research efforts in cross-corpus, cross-task multimodal affect recognition with explainable/accountable machine learning for the aim of efficient, effective and interpretable predictions on a data-scarce and sensitive target problem. The candidate is also expected to be involved in teaching activities within the department of Information and Computing Sciences. Teaching activities may include supporting senior teaching staff, conducting tutorials, and supervising student projects and theses. These activities will contribute to the development of the candidate's didactic skills.

We are looking for candidates with:

• a Master’s degree in computer science/engineering, mathematics, and/or fields related to the project focus;
• interest or experience with processing of audio/acoustics, vision/video or natural language;
• interest or experience with machine learning, affective computing, information fusion, multimodal interaction;
• demonstrable coding skills in high-level scripting languages such as MATLAB, python or R;
• excellent English oral and writing skills.

The ideal candidate should express a strong interest in research in affective computing and teaching within the ICS department. The Department finds gender balance specifically and diversity in a broader sense very important; therefore women are especially encouraged to apply. Applicants are encouraged to mention any personal circumstances that need to be taken into account in their evaluation, for example parental leave or military service.

We offer an exciting opportunity to contribute to an ambitious and international education programme with highly motivated students and to conduct your own research project at a renowned research university. You will receive appropriate training, personal supervision, and guidance for both your research and teaching tasks, which will provide an excellent start to an academic career.

The candidate is offered a position for five years (1.0 FTE). The gross salary starts at €2,325 and increases to €2,972 (scale P according to the Collective Labour Agreement Dutch Universities) per month for a full-time employment. Salaries are supplemented with a holiday bonus of 8% and a year-end bonus of 8.3% per year. In addition, Utrecht University offers excellent secondary conditions, including an attractive retirement scheme, (partly paid) parental leave and flexible employment conditions (multiple choice model). More information about working at Utrecht University can be found here.

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 societal themes. Our focus is on Dynamics of Youth, Institutions for Open Societies, Life Sciences and Sustainability.

The city of Utrecht is one of the oldest cities in the Netherlands, with a charming old centre and an internationally oriented culture that is strongly influenced by its century-old university. Utrecht city has been consistently ranked as one of the most liveable cities in the Netherlands and the most bicycle-friendly city in the world.

The Faculty of Science consists of six departments: Biology, Pharmaceutical Sciences, Information and Computing Sciences, Physics and Astronomy, Chemistry and Mathematics. The Faculty is home to 6,200 students and nearly 1,500 staff and is internationally renowned for the quality of its research. The Faculty's academic programmes reflect developments in today's society.

The Department of Information and Computing Sciences is nationally and internationally renowned for its research in Computing Science and Information Science. Current research groups are Algorithmic Data Analysis, Algorithms and Complexity, Decision Support Systems, Simulation of Complex Systems, Geometric Computing, Multimedia, Human-Centered Computing, Social and Affective Computing, Visualisation and Graphics, Interaction Technology, Process Management and Analytics, Organization and Information, Natural Language Processing, Intelligent Systems, Data Intensive Systems, Software Technology and Software Technology of Learning and Teaching. Relevant areas of interdisciplinary research include Artificial Intelligence, Game Research, Foundations of Complex Systems, Applied Data Science and Integrative Bioinformatics. The Department has, among others, close collaborations with the University Medical Center, the Departments of Physics and Mathematics, and the Faculties of Humanities and Geosciences. The Social and Affective Computing group is part of the Interaction division. We develop novel techniques to research technology-mediated communication and interaction between people, and communication and interaction between systems and people (users).