PhD Position Organizational Learning Around AI in the Security Sector

TU Delft is a top tier university and is exceedingly active in the field of Artificial intelligence. The Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at TU Delft will start a research project on 'Hybrid Explainable Workflows for Security and Threat Intelligence' and is looking for a PhD student for the socio-legal part of the project. The position will be hired as part of the TU Delft AI Futures lab on Rights and Justice , which is part of the TU Delft AI Labs programme.

This new PhD position at TU Delft will work closely together with our colleagues at Leiden university, which have also published a related position.

The research

Security professionals often make risk evaluations with the support of AI. These evaluations need to be shared with other professionals, inside and outside of their organization. However accurate representations of risk-based decision making in security communities are rare due to highly restricted information sharing. This leads to information being lost or only being available to a highly limited group of individuals, limiting possibilities of information-sharing. At the same time there are numerous legal, organizational and technical constraints that limit what and how information can be shared.

The research focus of this PhD candidate will look at how existing legal constraints can be implemented more systematically to enable organizational learning. Building on the work of Linda Argote (2012) on organizational learning and Mikkel Flyverbom on transparency (2016), we will study the “management of visibilities” (Flyverbom 2016) within the intelligence and security services. Our research will have a particular focus on current and upcoming legal constraints, as these have a considerable effect on the ways in which data can be managed and shared.

This PhD position is part of the project 'Hybrid Explainable Workflows for Security and Threat Intelligence', in which five PhD students will work on this issue as a team. Three PhD students will have a more technical focus, while the two working at Leiden University and TU Delft will have more of a social science or legal focus. We are looking for innovative researchers who want to collaborate with your colleagues and be open to new and innovative concepts and relationships between different academic disciplines.

Within this multidisciplinary project, we have a vacancy for a PhD research project on how key privacy, oversight and data minimization constraints are integrated into internal socio-technical processes and how organizational learning can take place despite limited information sharing.

Tasks and responsibilities

• Conducting innovative legal and social science research in the context of a multidisciplinary project and in cooperation with technical researchers;
• Publish and present scientific articles in international journals and conferences;
• Contribute to educational activities;
• Write a dissertation (monograph or paper-based);

AI Futures Lab: Rights and Justice

The AI Futures Lab is a TU Delft Artificial Intelligence Lab. Artificial Intelligence, Data and Digitalisation are becoming increasingly important when looking for answers to major scientific and societal challenges. In a TU Delft AI Lab, experts in ‘the fundamentals of AI technology’ along with experts in ‘AI challenges’ run a shared lab.