Last application date Jun 30, 2024 00:00
Department TW05 - Department of Information Technology
Contract Limited duration
Degree Master Computer Science, Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence, or equivalent
Occupancy rate 100%
Vacancy type Research staff
PhD Researcher on multimodal & knowledge-grounded dialogue systems
Job description
Ghent University is a world of its own. Employing more than 15.000 people, it is actively involved in education and research, management and administration, as well as technical and social service provision on a daily basis. It is one of the largest, most exciting employers in the area and offers great career opportunities.
With its 11 faculties and more than 85 departments offering state-of-the-art study programmes grounded in research in a wide range of academic fields, Ghent University is a logical choice for its staff and students.
The IDLab Ghent research group is seeking a highly motivated and talented PhD student to join the Text-to-Knowledge (T2K) team. The team has worked for many years on natural language processing tasks (NLP), especially on advanced information extraction, but in recent years, also on other topics, such as conversational agents.
In this PhD you will focus on designing new conversational AI models, based on recent foundation models, and in a multi-modal context, i.e., targeting use cases in human-robot interactions. The key research question is how state-of-the-art language models (including multi-modal versions) can be leveraged and adapted for specific knowledge-grounded tasks in human-robot communication. One of the target applications, is to support conversations with an educational goal, i.e., a robot as teaching assistant in interaction with students.
The PhD is part of the ambitious Flanders AI Research programme. Within this context, you will be able to interact with both fellow researchers across flemish universities and industry stakeholders throughout Flanders. As part of the IDLab text-to-knowledge team (T2K) you will benefit from input/feedback from other PhD students working on related topics. Beyond our own team, you will also work closely with researchers from other groups at UGent, in particular those working on social robots at AIRO and LT3 (at the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication).
Your main tasks will include:
In addition to your primary research responsibilities, you will actively contribute to the educational mission of our institution by providing (limited) support for courses in the area of AI, such as Natural Language Processing. In addition, you can take on a mentoring role by supervising master theses related to the subject of this PhD.
Job offer
Job profile
We are looking for a highly creative and motivated PhD student with the following qualifications and skills:
How to apply
Send your application by email to prof. Thomas Demeester (thomas.demeester@ugent.be) and prof. Chris Develder (chris.develder@ugent.be), with the subject ‘Application: PhD at T2K (ConvAI)’.
Applications should include:
After a first screening, selected candidates will be invited for an interview (in person or remotely via MS Teams).
Application deadline: June 30, 2024.
Start of the Ph.D. research: Possible as early as May 2024, but we aim for September 2024, for recently graduated students.
More info on:
https://t2k.idlab.ugent.be/
https://www.flandersairesearch.be/en
https://airo.ugent.be/
https://lt3.ugent.be/
https://www.lonelyplanet.com/belgium/flanders/ghent
Ghent University is one of the top 100 universities in the Dutch language area, with more than 44,000 students and 15,000 staff members.
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