Up to two PhD positions at the Division for Interaction Design and Software Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology.
Information about the position
Together with the successful applicant(s), we aim to investigate, develop, and systematically evaluate automated approaches to make autonomous systems more adaptive to humans and their needs. Autonomous systems can range from smart cloud-based systems to robots to automotive systems to Internet of Things systems. In the past, we have developed approaches to elicit quality requirements from human users, to explain the quality tradeoffs in automated planning using machine learning techniques, and to monitor systems in an adaptive way, so that safety constraints can be guaranteed while saving bandwidth. We found that it is crucial to not only elicit requirements when designing a system, but help humans to understand which requirements are feasible and how they impact other requirements at runtime. Depending on the context that a system operates in, it might be more or less desirable to ask a human for help, start collaborative tasks, or to give control to a human user. How can safety and security constraints be guaranteed in different contexts? How can humans express their changing preferences at runtime?
As a PhD student, you will have the opportunity to engage in both empirical research and constructive research. Constructive research involves designing architectures of human-aware systems, programming, or developing formal models to reason about these systems. Empirical research includes running experiments and performing studies with humans to assess the usefulness of the developed approaches.