About the Project
Our experience with technology is spread across devices, personal or shared, with physical or digital tools, and over time. With intelligent technologies becoming more advanced, affordable, and pervasive, with improved capabilities and greater awareness, intelligent assistants such as Alexa and Siri can move away from our personal space, and influence our everyday work practices. In this manner, this project will focus on the use of conversational agents within the workspace and their integration to the current “ecology” of personal or shared devices.
What happens when these technologies enter our lives as work assistants or even co-workers? What is the impact of an intelligent system on the social setting? How can we envision and design intelligent systems for the workplaces of the future?
While the advertisement sets the background for the potential area of work for the successful PhD candidate, there is still much scope to tailor the topic to the skills, knowledge and interests of the successful candidate.
Therefore, we invite applications from candidates that have an interest in exploring the impact and design implications for intelligent systems within the context of work or collaborative settings, taking a critical perspective on the social and cognitive implications. The successful candidate will design, prototype, develop and explore new designs of intelligent technologies that can revolutionise collaboration and coordination within the chosen context.
This project is well suited to a motivated and hard-working candidate with a keen interest in human-computer interaction, interaction design, prototype design, user experience, user behaviour and new technologies. A Master’s degree or experience in a relevant field (e.g. human-computer interaction (HCI), interaction design, user experience, user studies) will be considered an advantage.
The candidate will join the NorSC Lab, in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences.
This project is supervised by Dr Christina Vasiliou.
Eligibility and How to Apply:
Please note eligibility requirement:
• Academic excellence of the proposed student i.e. 2:1 (or equivalent GPA from non-UK universities [preference for 1st class honours]); or a Masters (preference for Merit or above); or APEL evidence of substantial practitioner achievement.
• Appropriate IELTS score, if required.
For further details of how to apply, entry requirements and the application form, see
https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/research/postgraduate-research-degrees/how-to-apply/
Please note: Applications that do not include a research proposal of approximately 1,000 words (not a copy of the advert), or that do not include the advert reference (e.g. SF19/EE/CIS/VASILIOU) will not be considered.
Start Date: 1 March 2020 or 1 October 2020
Northumbria University takes pride in, and values, the quality and diversity of our staff. We welcome applications from all members of the community. The University holds an Athena SWAN Bronze award in recognition of our commitment to improving employment practices for the advancement of gender equality and is a member of the Euraxess network, which delivers information and support to professional researchers.
References
Vasiliou, C., Ioannou, A., & Zaphiris, P. (2019). From behaviour to design: implications for artifact ecologies as shared spaces for design activities. Behaviour & Information Technology, 1-18.
Sutton, S. J., Foulkes, P., Kirk, D., & Lawson, S. (2019, April). Voice as a Design Material: Sociophonetic Inspired Design Strategies in Human-Computer Interaction. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (p. 603). ACM.
Vasiliou, C., Ioannou, A., Stylianou-Georgiou, A., & Zaphiris, P. (2017). A Glance into Social and Evolutionary Aspects of an Artifact Ecology for Collaborative Learning through the Lens of Distributed Cognition. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 33(8), 642-654.
Vasiliou, C., Ioannou, A., & Zaphiris, P. (2015). An artifact ecology in a nutshell: A distributed cognition perspective for collaboration and coordination. In Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 55-72). Springer.
Vasiliou, C., Ioannou, A., & Zaphiris, P. (2014). Understanding collaborative learning activities in an information ecology: A distributed cognition account. Computers in Human Behavior, 41, 544-553.
Zaphiris, P., Ioannou, A., Loizides, F., & Vasiliou, C. (2013). User experience in using surface computing for collaborative decision making. Interactive Technology and Smart Education, 10(4), 297-308.
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