The Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (https://www.unibz.it/) has opened a public competition for 21 fully funded PhD scholarships in Computer Science (deadline July 1, 2022). They cover a range of epistemologies, theories, methods and applications of computer science. Topics include studies of theoretical AI, data science and machine learning application, up to the design of the most advanced user interfaces and critical user research.

The affective dimension of word meaning often forms part of our reservoir of common-sense knowledge, and it is reflected in the way we use words. This project aims at producing and evaluating new technologies for recognition of emotional language and possibly other subtle pragmatic aspects of communication. Because there are diverse subtilties in emotional expressions in different languages, the project will devote particular attention in approaching the problem from a multilingual point of view. 

Human-human dialogues are characterized by collaborative behaviours, through which interlocutors achieve their communicative goals. As an example, proactivity (i.e., anticipating user needs during dialogue) and grounding (e.g., posing clarification questions) are two relevant cases that have been investigated from a linguistics perspective. However, such collaborative behaviours are still largely absent in current neural dialogue models. There are several open research challenges in this direction, including investigating how dialogue systems can learn when and how to be collaborative, depending on the dialogue context, and how do we evaluate whether collaborative behaviours have improved the efficacy of dialogue. This PhD project addresses collaborative behaviours in conversational agents from a computational perspective, exploiting the integration of machine learning approaches based on neural models, reinforcement learning, and knowledge-based techniques. 

Key information to apply and gain admission to the PhD Programme can be found here:

The scholarship includes
              University Fees
              3-year personal grant (approx. € 17,000 NET per year)
              50% pay increase to support international mobility for a period variable between 6 months and one year according to the type of projects
              Personal budget for research and travel expenses (Euro 2,500)
              State-of-the-art technical equipment
 
Further financial possibilities are available in the form of teaching contracts and research consultancies during the years of study, for top students.