Scientific Staff (prae doc)

The research group Visualization and Data Analysis (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Torsten Moeller, Dr. Laura Koesten) at the Faculty of Computer Sciences invites applications for the position of a research assistant aiming at a PhD degree.
We seek a highly motivated PhD researcher with a background in computer science, information science, or a related field. The successful applicant will work in collaboration with the project “Talking charts”, funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF). The applicant should be confident in engaging with different audiences and apply a number of different quantitative and qualitative scientific methods. We expect a high motivation to learn and engage with real world data, people and problems in an interdisciplinary setting. There will be the possibility to collaborate with other students.
We offer a pleasant work environment within a friendly, dynamic, international and young team in Vienna, one of the cities with the highest quality of life worldwide. The working language is English, and we are committed to diversity and inclusion. There are many opportunities to grow academically as well as personally, including the opportunity to act as possible team leads in research projects, engage in exchanges on an international scale and develop contacts to industry. We provide a close and supportive supervision of the thesis work and a highly collaborative research environment. There is an option to extend the contract after the PhD defense in the context of further academic training.

This role is for a fixed duration of 36 months.
- Participation in research and administration
- Participation in research projects / research studies
- Participation in publications / academic articles / presentations
- We expect the successful candidate to sign a doctoral thesis agreement within 12-18 months.
- Supervision of students
- Involvement in the organisation of meetings, conferences, symposiums
- Involvement in the department administration as well as in teaching and research administration

About the Talking charts project:
Visualizations are ubiquitous tools for communicating data, both within science and the popular media. Urgent messages with immediate effects on public life, i.e. the exponential growth of COVID-19, are often communicated via charts or diagrams. It is not clear whether public interpretations of these visualizations match the messages their creators aim to convey. The same is true for data visualizations in science; it is not a given that experts will interpret them the way they are intended. How do visualization producers create, and consumers understand, the messages carried in visualizations? How do consumers come to trust or to distrust, to act on or to ignore them?
Talking charts is a three-year mixed-methods project exploring how people encode, understand and engage with the messages (and implicit assumptions) communicated by data visualizations, particularly those f This role is for a fixed duration of 36 months.
- Participation in research and administration
- Participation in research projects / research studies
- Participation in publications / academic articles / presentations
- We expect the successful candidate to sign a doctoral thesis agreement within 12-18 months.
- Supervision of students
- Involvement in the organisation of meetings, conferences, symposiums
- Involvement in the department administration as well as in teaching and research administration

About the Talking charts project:
Visualizations are ubiquitous tools for communicating data, both within science and the popular media. Urgent messages with immediate effects on public life, i.e. the exponential growth of COVID-19, are often communicated via charts or diagrams. It is not clear whether public interpretations of these visualizations match the messages their creators aim to convey. The same is true for data visualizations in science; it is not a given that experts will interpret them the way they are intended. How do visualization producers create, and consumers understand, the messages carried in visualizations? How do consumers come to trust or to distrust, to act on or to ignore them?
Talking charts is a three-year mixed-methods project exploring how people encode, understand and engage with the messages (and implicit assumptions) communicated by data visualizations, particularly those focusing on COVID-19 and climate change.