During your Ph.D., you will join Dr Sole Pera and her team within the Web Information Systems group, to work on advancing how recommender systems can better support youngsters— children, teenagers, and young adults. Youngsters have particular cognitive, social, physical, and emotional needs that make the information they seek, their experiences, sense-making, and skills different from those of adults. This offers a wide range of open research directions.
Undertaking such a Ph.D. project often entails (a) identifying the challenges and potential harms youngsters encounter when interacting with recommender systems that offer items for learning or leisure, such as books, videos, and TikToks, and (b) designing and developing the technological advances needed to address them. Along the way, you will study how youngsters interact with recommender systems using various perspectives. You will also investigate how to leverage the dynamic human traits unique to youngsters to model users and how such modeling can impact technology design. Moreover, you will explore how to evaluate new solutions, particularly in the absence of benchmarks or when existing restrictions, such as federal regulations or inclusion/accessibility objectives, need to be considered.
Application deadline: September 29, 2023
Details: Job details (tudelft.nl)