The group of Vera Demberg https://www.uni-saarland.de/lehrstuhl/demberg.html invites applications for 2 PhD positions at Saarland University (starting from Jan 2027 or soon thereafter, for 3 years with possible contract extension).
The PhD topics are: *Individualised AI Assistants for Software Comprehension* This position aims to make AI coding assistants adaptive to individual developers rather than one-size-fits-all. Using behavioural, eye-tracking, and EEG data, the doctoral researcher will build interpretable models that group developers by how they comprehend code and relate these groups to factors such as experience and working memory. These models will then drive controllable, faithful generation of code, tests, and explanations, drawing on the Rational Speech Acts framework, retrieval-augmented grounding, and real-time gaze and EEG signals.
See the full ad for more details and application info: https://www.uni-saarland.de/fileadmin/upload/verwaltung/stellen/Wissenschaft... * Cooperative User Interfaces as Rational Agents* This position develops LLM agents that reason explicitly about what a specific user knows and communicate accordingly, grounded in personal knowledge bases (PKBs) that represent a user's knowledge and beliefs. The doctoral researcher will study how background knowledge shapes interpretation, build knowledge-graph-augmented LLMs that predict how a text will be understood, and use the Rational Speech Acts framework to generate messages that fill relevant knowledge gaps. Mechanistic interpretability and activation steering will be used to test and strengthen how reliably LLMs rely on PKB information rather than their built-in knowledge.
See the full ad for more details and application info: https://www.uni-saarland.de/fileadmin/upload/verwaltung/stellen/Wissenschaft...
If you have further questions, please email Vera Demberg demberg@lst.uni-saarland.de mailto:demberg@lst.uni-saarland.de.