PhD Positions in Human-AI Collaboration for Design at Scale (D@S)

Challenge Design to tackle large-scale, systemic challenges in society.
Change Integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Human Intelligence at scale—Hybrid Intelligence (HI).
Impact Enable designers, domain experts, and societal stakeholders to collaborate with AI for informing, realising, and evaluating large-scale design interventions

TU Delft is a top tier university and is exceedingly active in the field of Artificial intelligence. The mission of the Design at Scale (D@S) Lab is to bring together TU-Delft expertise in Design and Computer Science to establish a centre of excellence in Hybrid Intelligence for Societal-Scale Design. Hybrid Intelligence can play a key role in reducing the complexity of design for large-scale societal problems by orchestrating large-scale design activities involving people, data and machines. This is achieved by informing effective design interventions, predicting the impact of design interventions, monitoring and learning from the implementation of design interventions, and adapting design interventions over time to maximise their impact.

Designers increasingly aim to tackle systemic challenges in society (e.g., health and wellbeing, climate action, mobility, inclusiveness, etc.). This requires new design methods and tools that operate at societal scale and enable designers to effectively involve large numbers of stakeholders and harness large amounts of data to analyse complex social systems and assess the longitudinal impact of design interventions. In particular, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted shortcomings of current design approaches which remain limited in scope, involving small groups of design experts and users across relatively short time frames. Hybrid Intelligence (HI)—the integration of Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence at scale—bears immense potential for transforming and scaling up Design, to enable designers to effectively tackle complex societal problems.

In total, D@S lab offers 4 PhD positions: 2 PhD positions with a Design profile, and 2 PhD positions with a Computer Science profile. In this call, we are looking for the following Computer Science profile positions:

Human-AI Interaction for Design at Scale
While AI systems offer computational powers that vastly transcend human capabilities, the impact of AI systems on human behaviour remains largely unexplored. To harness the virtues of AI in a manner that is beneficial and useful in design contexts, it is essential to bridge this crucial gap. The aim of the research on this PhD project is to develop principles of human-AI interaction answering research questions such as how system behaviour conforms to human understanding of various tasks and how to best explain system behaviour to human users and support decision-making. You will carry out interdisciplinary research with a particular focus on conversational crowd computing approaches that engage large groups of people through conversational interfaces. This research lies at the intersection of HCI, design, and Artificial Intelligence and has a strong emphasis on the combination of technological prototyping and empirical research.

Human-in-the-Loop AI for Design at Scale
AI systems are dominated by machine-learned models that often capture biases from the training data, generating undesired outcomes with safety, ethical, and societal concerns across applications in different contexts. For such systems to best serve users, domain experts, and designers, it is essential to elicit from relevant stakeholders their requirements, knowledge, and values, and to test and improve the systems accordingly. The research on this PhD project aims at developing guidelines and workflows for probing needs from design stakeholders and developing computational methods for testing AI system behaviour against such needs and improving AI systems by integrating human intelligence. You are expected to work in an interdisciplinary research team on real-world use cases. This research lies at the intersection of HCI, Design, and Artificial Intelligence, and has a strong focus on the combination of user research and system design