A PhD student position in AI and Democracy at the University of Zurich, Switzerland

The Dynamic and Distributed Information System (DDIS) Group at the University of Zurich (see also see also http://ddis.ch) is happy to announce the following open positions:

   A PhD student position in AI (including chat-bots and large language models) and Democracy.

Are you interested in inventing new AI’s that will help change how democracy work? Do you want to democratize politics with chat-bots and large language models? Are you interested in developing AIs that can do good in our society? Then this position is for you.

The Dynamic and Distributed Information Systems Group at the University of Zurich is looking for motivated applicants who are interested in investigating how AIs can interact with users to help large-scale participation in democratic processes. You will work the context of a new SNSF interdisciplinary project that will investigate how to use AI in direct democracy. The project includes user experiments of AI support in the context of real-world democratic processes. The project includes 8 PhD students – three of which in CS/CSCW/AI, two in political science, and two in law – as well as a post-doc and faculty members form these disciplines.

We offer:
A highly exciting, timely, and societally important as well as meaningful research topic in the field of a fast evolving research field (AI support)
A diverse and multi-disciplinary research group of highly motivated colleagues who are passionate about topics at the intersection of computer science, AI, and social science
Strong support for your professional/career development
Attractive work environment both within the research group and beyond: the University of Zurich is one of Switzerland's leading universities in the middle of a vibrant, cosmopolitan city that regularly ranks as one of the cities with the highest quality of life in the world.
Generous support for professional travel and research needs

Requirements:

MSc in Computer Science or a related discipline (such as information systems or human-computer interaction); the degree should be attained by the time you start the position
A passion for discovering new things
Interest in both the technical and HCI aspects of conversational agents
Experience in the areas of AI, semantic web technologies, machine learning, and/or behavioral analyses such as running experiments with human subjects or surveys are considered a plus but are not strictly necessary.

To apply, please gather your curriculum vitae, all grade transcripts, selected publications (if available), a list of at least three references, and your BSc/MSc theses as PDF files and go to:

   https://www.apply.dsi.uzh.ch/position/17891329 (please select «English» as language)

Note that we will evaluate appliations on a roling basis. So applying as soon as possible is advantageous.


The University of Zurich is committed to enhancing the number of women in scientific positions and, therefore, particularly invites women to apply.

HTML version of the job advertisement: https://www.ifi.uzh.ch/en/ddis/jobs.html


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|  Professor Abraham Bernstein, PhD
|  University of Zürich, Department of Informatics
|  web: http://www.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/bernstein.html