4-year PhD position on Conversational Agents and User Involvement during Software Evolution

As a PhD student you will be part of a research project on designing and implementing conversational agents to ensure the actionability of user feedback about software applications and to elicit ethical concerns related to software products. The research groups in Social AI and in Software and Sustainability (S2) will be involved in this joint research. The Social AI group focuses on research for improving the way in which humans and machines understand and interact with each other, whereas the S2 group has ample expertise in empirical methods in software engineering and in user involvement research.

Your supervisors will be: Prof. Koen Hindriks (VU, Social AI), Prof. Patricia Lago (VU, Software and Sustainability), while daily supervision will be done by Dr. Emitzá Guzmán (VU, Software and Sustainability) and Dr. Florian Kunneman (VU, Social AI).

Brief project description

To create and maintain software that is useful, usable and ethical, user needs, expectations and concerns should be considered in the pre and post deployment phases. Users increasingly express feedback about software applications through social media and specialized user feedback platforms, which may be automatically identified and summarized to reduce manual workload.
In this project we will address two challenges connected to this automated extraction of user feedback:
The first is to ensure the actionability of user feedback. We will do this by detecting whether any relevant aspects of user feedback are missing and deploying a conversational agent to ask the user for missing aspects, if any.
The second challenge is to elicit ethical concerns related to the software from end-users that give feedback on social media. We will do this by developing a conversational agent that asks users from diverse backgrounds about ethical concerns that should be addressed in the software application.