Comprehending and changing perceptions of elderly care using AI and citizen science

The Advanced Care Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh is a new £20m interdisciplinary research collaboration aiming to transform later life with person centred integrated care

The vision of the ACRC is to play a vital role in addressing the Grand Challenge of ageing by transformational research that will support the functional ability of people in later life so they can contribute to their own welfare for longer. With fresh and diverse thinking across interdisciplinary perspectives our academy students will work to creatively embed deep understanding, data science, artificial intelligence, assistive technologies and robotics into systems of health and social care supporting the independence, dignity and quality-of-life of people living in their own homes and in supported care environments.

The ACRC Academy will equip future leaders to drive society’s response to the challenges of later life care provision; a problem which is growing in scale, complexity and urgency. Our alumni will become leaders in across a diverse range of pioneering and influential roles in the public, private and third sectors. 

Applications are invited for a PhD position to be based at the School of Informatics and the School of Health and at the University of Edinburgh. The position is an opportunity to combine cutting-edge research at the intersection of AI, citizen science and psychology in service of building computer systems for understanding and improving perceptions of care in later life. The project will design a citizen science platform to collect images of care from diverse populations in society; develop a new methodology for inferring different perceptions of care; change negative perceptions of care communication between stakeholders. 

Technical themes of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Multi-agent learning and decision-making
• Artificial Intelligence for social good
• Incentive design for human-computer collaboration
• Citizen Science

Why Edinburgh?

The School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh has one of the largest concentrations of computer science research in Europe, with over 100 faculty members and hundreds of PhD students. The school is particularly strong in the research area of artificial intelligence. Our strength in these areas have been recognised by an award of EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Science. The University of Edinburgh is one of the founding partners of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national research institute for data science.

  The position is an opportunity to combine cutting-edge research at the intersection of explainable AI, Psychology and health,  in service of building computer systems that learn to collaborate with their human users and guide their interaction over time.

Technical themes of interest include (but are not limited to):

• AI for social good
• Human aware machine learning

Eligibility:

The project is suitable for a student with a top MSc or first-class bachelor's degree in computer science, cognitive psychology, statistics, physics, or a related discipline.

Previous coursework or experience in machine learning, artificial intelligence, A strong programming background will be essential for this project.

For further information please contact Dr. Stella Chan Dr. Kobi Gal (kgal@inf.ed.ac.uk). (http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/kgal/index.html)