[jobs] Call for PhD positions in HRI @University of Napoli Federico II
Silvia Rossi
Start date: November 2024
Application deadline: July 9, 2024 (12 noon, CET time)
As part of the initiative Italian National Doctoral School in Robotics and Intelligent Machines (DRIM), the University of Naples Federico II is offering 1 Ph.D. position starting in November 2023.
DRIM is an initiative of I-RIM, the Italian Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Machines (https://i-rim.it/en/). DRIM is a consortium of 27 highly qualified international-level Italian Universities and Research Institutions proposing the research themes and funding the scholarships. The University of Genoa manages the administration of the Ph.D. school on behalf of the whole consortium.
The Ph.D. has a duration of 36 months.
The researcher will focus on the following topics:
Research topic: Healthcare and wellness of persons - Context Awareness for Interaction with Social Robots
This project investigates how a robotic system can engage a user in context-aware interactions by leveraging dialogue and multimodality. To do so, we aim to investigate how a robotic system can understand and appropriately interpret human multimodal cues or predict the intentions, situational and social context, and future actions of other actors. The project intends to investigate how the use of LLM and multimodal LLM can leverage natural mechanisms for both understanding users’ intentions, beliefs and situational context as well as to produce effective content-dependent and personalized dialogues as follows: 1) Investigate the use of multimodal LLM and Transformer models with cross-modal attention layers for simultaneously identifying and interpreting human social verbal and non-verbal cues and understanding people’s intentions. 2) Design of Retrieval Augmented Generation systems, including knowledge representation and LLM fine-tuning. 3) Combine Situational and Domain knowledge representation supporting context-aware social robots. 4) Fine-tuning of multimodal LLM to support image-grounded dialogue systems in virtual environments.
Requirements:
MSc or equivalent in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science or Engineering with a focus on Intelligent Systems, Intelligent Robotics, Machine Learning and Human-Robot Interaction is required. Excellent programming skills (Python, C++, Machine Learning Frameworks, ROS etc.) are needed. The post provides access to courses by top researchers in any of the participating institutions and the chance to spend visiting periods in other highly specialized centres in Europe and worldwide. Applicants who already have a doctoral degree are not eligible. Excellent English communication skills are an important requirement.
Application:
Applications are *now open* for multiple positions. At the University of Naples Federico II, the application is for 1 position. For further information please contact silvia...@unina.it.
Instructions to apply are available here: https://drim.i-rim.it/en/admission/.