YOUR FUNCTION

This vacancy for a PhD-candidate position is part of a larger research program, an EU-funded ‘ERC Advanced Grant’, titled “Understanding Human-Robot Bonding to Optimize Personal Support” [ROBOT-BOND], awarded to prof. dr. Elly A. Konijn (PI) with a total duration of 5 years. See: www.robot-bond.nl
The overarching aim of the ERC-project ROBOT-BOND is to develop and empirically validate a new theory on Human-Robot-Bonding for longer term interactions focusing on various target groups. The different target groups include children, adolescents, students, and adults. Social robots are being developed to assist professionals in areas in healthcare and education, where they face serious shortages in human personnel. Our project focuses specifically on developing scenarios to provide support for those who need a little extra in the social and communicative realm. Establishing some form of a bond between the human user and a robot is seen as essential to effectively use a social robot over longer time. The research team will compare different types of robots in varying contexts, with different tasks and different target groups. Within this research program, we integrate research from the perspectives of Communication Science and Media Psychology, with Developmental and Clinical Psychology, Computer Sciences/AI, Human-Robot-Interaction, and Natural Language Processing in focus groups, experiments, and field studies. The PhD-candidate will closely collaborate with three Postdoctoral researchers, two PhD-candidates and a software/AI engineer, who are currently hired in the same project, among others.

ABOUT THE PROJECT, DEPARTMENT, INSTITUTE

There is a lot of talk about robots taking part in our lives in the near future, but little is known about how robots can talk to us to create a social-affective bond or to befriend. This EU-granted project “Understanding Human-Robot Bonding to Optimize Personal Support” [ROBOT-BOND] is looking for an ambitious and highly-motivated PhD-student who wants to work on our robot projects in a multidisciplinary team. The purchase of a large number of different social robots is foreseen (e.g., NAO, QTrobot, Navel, Furhat, Misty, Buddy, Ari). Our robots will be equipped with communication modules and need a personalized language to build relationships with human users in specific social contexts to examine how to optimize support. Through establishing social-affective bonds and shared experiences, robots can be enabled to communicate more efficiently and vice versa. The current program examines how, when, why and for whom affective bonding might occur through robot communication in various social contexts in healthcare and education, specifically targeting primary education, special needs education, disabled young adults, adolescents with mood issues, and university students. We closely collaborate with specialized institutions (e.g., GGZinGeest/Arkin, Philadelphia, SBO de Brigantijn, various primary schools). The multi-methodological approach pairs fundamental research with in-situ observations in education and healthcare, complementarily benefitting science and society. In this project, the PhD-candidate will work together with three postdoctoral researchers, two PhD-candidates, an AI/software engineer, research assistants, and the supervisory team as well as with related researchers within and outside the department.
The research is primarily embedded in the Media Psychology Program at the department of Communication Science. Main supervisor is Prof. dr. Elly A. Konijn (https://research.vu.nl/en/persons/elly-konijn) and other (co-)supervisors are appointed based on relevant expertise per project. They are international key players in the field of media psychology and social robotics and have won several prestigious prizes honoring their work (e.g., Eureka, Huibregtsenprijs, from NWO/KNAW). You will be part of a substantial group of pioneering international researchers working on social robots for social communication. The project started in January 2025 and runs until 2030. See the project’s website at: www.robot-bond.nl.

Collaborate in an interdisciplinary team (media psychology, developmental, educational, and clinical psychology, computational linguistics, AI) to further develop and empirically validate a theory on affective bonding with social robots through focus groups and in field studies. First studies in each sub-project explore best fitting robot options, communication cues, needs, and goals to be aligned between robots and targeted users. To assess the theoretical constructs in the model, new short-form measurement devices need to be developed and optimized through pre-testing and validation in representative samples. Further testing occurs with various robots differing in appearances and competencies within specific social contexts, related to answer the overarching research question. Together with your supervisors and team members, you will plan and execute your own research project, collaborate in others, carry out your research according to international standards, ethical and open science principles, make your research and experiments publicly available and reproducible, and publish it in leading international journals, conference proceedings, and brief reports accessible to the public at large. The research work of the PhD-candidates should result in a timely completion of a dissertation each. As a PhD-candidate, you will take part in the Graduate School of Social Sciences (GSSS) that offers a wide range of courses for your further academic development (see website, ‘Starting your PhD trajectory’). More detailed information is available upon request.
PhD-candidate (4 yr full-time: 1 fte) will have a specific focus on primary education with a robot as tutor for a specific topic to be decided (e.g., arithmetic, second language learning) in field studies. This includes close collaboration with primary schools on location.