Eager to apply interactive voice-based AI techniques to support elderly people in dementia care? People with dementia (PwD) are increasingly in need of social and healthcare support.

As care professionals are less available in the current job market, this may become a heavy burden for informal carers. Interactive AI solutions, such as embodied conversational agents, offer promising opportunities to alleviate some of this burden, as they are cost effective, scalable and user friendly. In particular voice-based AI offers interesting possibilities, since it provides elderly PwD with a natural interface that allows them to talk about their daily activities (e.g. cooking, medication intake) without becoming too intrusive. Moreover, voice diagnostics based on machine learning methods hold great promise in dementia care because of its usefulness in diagnosing and monitoring neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

In this project you will therefore contribute to the development and evaluation of an interactive voice-based AI system that aims to improve the Quality of Life of elderly PwD. The personalised, enduring and adaptive support of this system is intended to improve over time, based on data-driven learning technologies, and will include an embodied conversational agent that supports PwD in their daily activities and social relations. First versions of such an agent for supporting older adults have been developed and tested in other projects (BLISS and QoLEAD). In addition to the conversational agent, the envisioned framework includes technologies from areas such as cloud computing, game development, machine learning, symbolic modelling and reasoning, and home automation and/or wearable sensing. In co-creation with the stakeholders, these technologies will be advanced and combined into a framework for ’blended’ network care (i.e. care from informal and professional carers, supported by socially interactive AI).

In this context, the Faculty of Arts is looking for a PhD candidate in interactive voice-based AI for dementia care. You will work in a multidisciplinary group consisting of PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers and professors in different domains such as human-computer interaction, virtual humans, linguistics, language and speech technology, speech recognition (ASR), NLP, and game design.

In this project we aim to collaborate with the teams of two ongoing related projects, one aims to develop a virtual human to support people with memory loss, and the other is the QoLEAD project, which focuses on using AI solutions to improve the quality of life for people with Alzheimer.

In this project you will work on designing dialogues and study how conversational agents can adapt to the level of speech comprehension of users with a neurodegenerative disease, for example by using a slower speech rate, a clearer pitch, a smaller vocabulary and shorter sentences. You will also study how the agent can fix a dialogue that went wrong. This may also include the development of tools for diagnosing the stage of dementia based on user speech.

Other tasks that you may work on include: 1) creating (speech) data collection specifications and risk assessment in collaboration with stakeholders from the medical domains, 2) developing and testing algorithms for appropriate virtual human behaviour and animations, and 3) design and evaluate voicebot dialogues with other persons in the social network of users with neurodegenerative diseases, such as formal and informal caregivers.

Although the ideas mentioned above provide examples of the types of tasks you may work on, you will still have plenty of freedom to fill in the details of the PhD project. Therefore, you are invited to submit your own proposal on how to fill in the PhD project together with your application.

You will be expected to publish your results in leading conferences and journals. The position may also include some educational duties such as supervision of Bachelor’s and Master’s students.

• You have a Master’s degree in computer science, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, machine learning, game and media technology, speech and language technology, or equivalent.
• You have proven expertise or a strong interest in responsible, socially interactive AI.
• You have an affinity with dementia care.
• You have a demonstrable affinity for academic research, as evidenced by publications and/or presentations.
• You have an interest in interdisciplinary research and the ability to communicate across domain boundaries.
• You have the ability and experience to work independently within the larger context of an interdisciplinary team.
• You have programming skills, and experience with speech and language technology.
• You have good academic writing skills.
• You are willing to perform teaching and service duties.
• You are fluent in spoken and written English and preferably have a working knowledge of the Dutch language (because you will need to interact with and understand Dutch speaking participants with cognitive problems).

• We will give you a temporary employment contract (0.8 FTE 5- year contract - 1.0 FTE 4- year contract) of 1,5 years, after which your performance will be evaluated. If the evaluation is positive, your contract will be extended by 2.5 years (4-year contract) or 3.5 years (5-year contract).
• You will receive a starting salary of €2,872 gross per month based on a 38-hour working week, which will increase to €3,670 from the fourth year onwards (salary scale P).
• You will receive an 8% holiday allowance and an 8,3% end-of-year bonus.
• You will be able to use our Dual Career and Family Support Service. The Dual Career Programme assists your partner via support, tools, and resources to improve their chances of independently finding employment in the Netherlands. Our Family Support Service helps you and your partner feel welcome and at home by providing customised assistance in navigating local facilities, schools, and amenities. Also take a look at our support for international staff page to discover all our services for international employees.
• You will receive extra days off. With full-time employment, you can choose between 30 or 41 days of annual leave instead of the statutory 20.

Work and science require good employment practices. This is reflected in Radboud University's primary and secondary employment conditions. You can make arrangements for the best possible work-life balance with flexible working hours, various leave arrangements and working from home. You are also able to compose part of your employment conditions yourself, for example, exchange income for extra leave days and receive a reimbursement for your sports subscription. And of course, we offer a good pension plan. You are given plenty of room and responsibility to develop your talents and realise your ambitions. Therefore, we provide various training and development schemes.

Working on the NWO-funded research project "Responsible AI for Voice Diagnostics" led by Dr Cristian Tejedor-García, you will be part of a new and proactive group of six PhD candidates and several researchers and professors at the Centre for Language Studies (CLS) of Radboud University. The project leverages Radboud AI, Radboud’s campus-overarching, interdisciplinary AI initiative, which connects the Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, and the Radboud university medical center. The project has links with the Radboud Healthy Data programme, the National AI Education Lab (NOLAI), the AI Hub East Netherlands, relevant health-related Innovation Centres for Artificial Intelligence (ICAI) labs, and the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS).. The project addresses the challenges related to machine learning, natural language processing, data dependencies, quality and enrichment, ethical dimensions of AI and legal requirements for AI.