PhD Position on Supporting Climate Change Deliberations via Artificial Intelligence

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Collective action by all stakeholders (e.g., public administrators, scientists, and citizens) is necessary to tackle a global societal challenge such as climate change. Collective action requires systematic deliberations and negotiations in each step of climate change mitigation and adaptation. Current, largely manual, approaches for deliberation and negotiation are subject to significant pitfalls, including limited participation, information overload, balkanization, and a variety of cognitive biases.

The goal of this PhD project to contribute toward the development of a hybrid-intelligence (HI) platform for supporting climate change deliberations and negotiations. The HI deliberation platform will support humans with AI (specifically, via natural language processing, and knowledge representation and reasoning techniques) in tasks such as recognizing the deliberative structure of discussions, clustering and visualizing arguments and perspectives, finding novel objectives, and modeling opinion dynamics over time.

This is a PhD position in the Hippo (Hyper-heuristics for interpretable public policy analysis) lab. The core goal of the Hippo lab is to advance multi-purpose decision support using collaborative and heuristic AI methods. You will work as part of an interdisciplinary team between the Interactive Intelligence section in the Intelligent Systems (INSY) department at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) and the Policy Analysis section in the Multi-Actor systems (MAS) department at the Faculty of Technology Policy and Management (TPM), tackling the following major scientific challenges:

1. How can we integrate subjective notions of ethics and fairness into algorithmic design?
2. How can we create an optimality taxonomy to find effective trade-offs in policy search?
3. How can we develop interpretable AI methods to gain public confidence and provide unbiased support in real decision-making contexts?
4. How can we support public policy deliberation via collaborative AI methods?

The Hippo lab is a Delft Artificial Intelligence Lab. Artificial Intelligence, Data and Digitalisation are becoming increasingly important when looking for answers to major scientific and societal challenges. In a DAI-lab, experts in ‘the fundamentals of AI technology’ along with experts in ‘AI challenges’ run a shared lab. As a PhD, you will work with at least two academic members of staff and three other PhD candidates. In total TU Delft will establish 24 DAI-Labs, where 48 Tenure Trackers and 96 PhD candidates will have the opportunity to push the boundaries of science using AI. Each team is driven by research questions which arise from scientific and societal challenges, and contribute to the development and execution of domain specific education. You will receive a 5-year contract and will be deployed for AI-related education for the usual teaching effort for PhD students in the faculty plus an additional 20%. The extra year compared to the usual 4-year contract accommodates the 20% additional AI, Data and Digitalisation education related activities. All team members have many opportunities for self-development. You will be a member of the thriving DAI-Lab community that fosters cross-fertilization between talents with different expertise and disciplines.

For description of other projects in Hippo lab, visit: https://ii.tudelft.nl/~pradeep/hippo.html

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