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Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is home to more than 26,000 students. We employ over 4,600 individuals. The VU campus is easily accessible and located in the heart of Amsterdam’s Zuidas district, a truly inspiring environment for teaching and research.
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About the department, institute, projectThere is a lot of talk about robots taking part in our lives but little is known about how to build robots that can talk to us to create a social bond and to become friends. The NWO project "Communicating with and Relating to Social Robots" is looking for an ambitious and highly-motivated PhD student that wants to work on our robot project. Our robot uses communication to learn about ourselves and the world but she also needs to develop a personalised language at the same time. Our social bond and shared experiences enable us to communicate more efficiently with less variation and ambiguity. In this project, the PhD studies how communication models can be adapted and become more efficient, more empathic and more natural on the basis of the social bond and the shared experience.
The PhD will work together with another PhD that focuses on the affective bonding and a PostDoc that develops the experimental robot framework.
The research is embedded in the Computational Lexicology and Terminology Lab (
http://cltl.nl), which is one of the world’s leading research groups in Human Language technology. Prof. dr. Piek Vossen, recipient of the NWO Spinoza Prize, heads the group of international researchers that are working on ground-breaking projects, among which the Spinoza project ‘Understanding Language by Machines:
http://www.understandinglanguagebymachines.org. Within that framework several PhDs are working on the Leolani project, with which the PhD will also collaborate:
http://makerobotstalk.nl.
Finally, CLTL and the research you are involved in is also embedded in the VU-gravity project on Hybrid Intelligence:
https://www.hybrid-intelligence-centre.nl. You will collaborate with many researchers on key notions such as collaborative, explainable, adaptable and responsible AI.