PhD position on Human-Centred Digital Twins in Industrial Work Environments

Digital twins enjoy significant take-up in a wide range of industries and application domains. The live coupling of the physical and digital worlds in digital twins targets the near real time operation and control of physical systems, in a form of mixed physical-digital-human system. Recent research has targeted the development of Human-Centred Digital Twins, as the Digital Twinning of physical and digital entities in socio-technical systems, but with clear emphasis on the actual role, contribution, and benefit of the human operator. A human – centred Digital Twin would be more effective if it achieves a cognitive coupling between humans and machines. A starting point for such coupling is to develop context models for situation awareness. Overall, your project will research requirements, methods, tools, and their application in project uses cases, resulting in a proposed framework for sliding work sharing between human and non-human actors, which would be a significant enhancement over currently available Digital Twins. The research will be carried out within the European research project AI4Work: Human-centric Digital Twin Approaches to Trustworthy AI and Robotics for Improved Working Conditions.

Your role
You will work within the Department of Operations. The AI4Work projects involves collaboration with a consortium which includes technology providers, industry experts from multiple domains, academic & research institutions, and other organisations, offering the right partnership mix of stakeholders to integrate a multi-stakeholder viewpoint on the research. The project will offer you opportunities to develop and apply your skills in impactful research. You will be expected to contribute to project research towards novel approaches for Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence (HCAI), leading to high quality research outcomes, including technical reporting and publications, informed by and serving the needs of industrial use cases. You will also participate and represent the University of Groningen team in project regular meetings, will contribute to project activities, and will engage with project partners and external stakeholders, demonstrating own initiative.

You will be supervised by Dr Christos Emmanouilidis (Promoter) and co-supervised by Dr Jos Bokhorst (co-promoter) from the Operations Department, Faculty of Economics and Business. As part of international collaboration, and subject of interest, the possibility of a double PhD degree with Politecnico di Milano, School of Management, Italy, can be discussed. Co-supervision with the Faculty of Science and Engineering is also possible.

Organisation
Since its foundation in 1614, the University of Groningen has enjoyed an international reputation as a dynamic and innovative centre of higher education offering high-quality teaching and research. Belonging to the best research universities of Europe and joining forces with prestigious partner universities and networks, the University of Groningen is truly an international place of knowledge.

Faculty of Economics and Business
The Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB) offers an inspiring study and work environment for students and employees. International accreditation enables the Faculty to assess performance against the highest international standards. It also creates an exciting environment of continuous improvement. FEB's programmes, academic staff and research do well on various excellence ranking lists.

Qualifications

• a Master’s degree in Management / Industrial Engineering, Computing/Data Science, Engineering or other related to the job Science field (completed or near completion)

Experience and competences

• you should be a proactive, self-driven individual, with critical thinking, who can excel in an environment that offers collaboration options, within the supervising and organisation teams, but also within the extensive project partnership, able to perform within project timescales
• competences in data analytics, machine learning / AI (for example in Python and relevant machine learning libraries), as well as interest and ability to expand such competences
• experience with programming for data management and data integration would be an advantage
• excellent technical and research report writing skills
• ability and interest in combining theory with experimental research
• excellent communication skills and proficiency (written and verbal) in English
• readiness and willingness to engage/collaborate with consortium partners and other researchers as a team player working in an interdisciplinary environment

We offer you in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities:

• a salary of € 2,770 gross per month in the first year, up to a maximum of € 3,539 gross per month in the fourth and final year
• a full-time position (1.0 FTE) for a period of in principle four years, under the condition of a positive assessment at the end of the first year
• a holiday allowance of 8% gross annual income
• an 8.3% end-of-the-year allowance

Preferred starting date: as soon as possible.

For information on the research projects please contact Dr Christos Emmanouilidis,   [email protected]