PhD Position F/M Multidisciplinary PhD: better understand and improve collaboration among peers

Context: Collaboration among peers is a core part of education, in France as in other countries. However surprisingly little is known about how to optimize collaboration, how to choose which students should work together, how their work conversations should be managed, and how to design educational materials and and educational technologies in order to increase learning gains for all members of a collaboration group. 

In this PhD the student will work with the research team to bring together a range of disciplinary approaches, including linguistics, psychology, education, AI, and neuroscience, in order to better understand peer collaboration, and to use the results to build models of optimal peer collaboration that can then be implemented in conversational agent systems.

For more information about the background of the work, candidates may see the PhD supervisor's papers, found here <www.justinecassell.com>, the research group's website, found here: <https://articulab.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/>, and a recent publication from the team working on this project, found here: <https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroergonomics/articles/10.3389/fnrgo.2024.1290256/full>.

Assignments :

The student chosen for this PhD is expected to take the initiative to become fully informed and conversant in all of the literature implicated in this research, and to share that knowledge with the supervisor and other team members. 

On the basis of that literature, the student chosen for this PhD will -work with the team to:

• design and implement an experiment that brings together peers to work on education-oriented tasks.
• manage and analyze multimodal data collected during the experiment, including conversational data, educational performance, metrics of interpersonal bonds, and fNIRS data on interbrain synchrony among the collaborating students. 
• build both social science and computational models of the results.
• write up and publish the results, in such a way as to lead to a PhD thesis.

Main activities :

• Discover, read, and summarize the necessary background literature
• Help to design experiments to answer the core questions of the research
• Manage and analyze data collected during the experiments
• Build models of the results that can be used to implement peer conversational agents
• Write papers, present, and publish research 

Additional activities :

•  - Build and maintain solid relationships with educational organizations, improving the experimental design with their feedback, providing feedback to them,  and managing data collection in a way that benefits them as well as the research group.
• Collaborate with other project members to regularly produce documentation, slides and other materials about the research that can be used with a variety of audiences.
• Manage interns working on the project.

In order to apply for this PhD student position, please upload into JobIn the following:

1. An up-to-date CV.
2. A letter of motivation describing your relevant experience and interests
3. The names amd contact information of 3 people who can write recommendations for you (please note that letters of recommendation will not be accepted - only names and contact information for recommenders that we will contact).

The successful candidate should have:

• a strong grasp of French or English, and be willing to learn the second language.
• a background in psychology, education, and / or cognitive science

• Subsidized meals
• Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
• Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
• Possibility of teleworking
• Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.)
• Social, cultural and sports events and activities
• Access to vocational training
• Social security coverage