PhD in Visual Analytics for Explainable Visual Rehabilitation

In this project, several teams (clinical centers, serious game developers, and academic institutions) combine their multidisciplinary skills to create and deploy a solution for rehabilitating patients having visual impairments by offering them training scenarios using a virtual reality (VR) setup.

Your job

The Visualisation and Graphics group within the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University (UU) is offering a four-year PhD position in Visual Analytics for Explainable Visual Rehabilitation. Research is conducted in close collaboration with the SMARTneurolab at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Department of Experimental Psychology. This position is part of a set of vacancies in the NWO-funded project VR4eVR: Virtual Reality for Enriched Visual Rehabilitation.

As PhD candidate in this project, you will conduct independent, high-quality research resulting in a doctoral dissertation. Your research will focus on designing a Visual Analytics solution to analyse data from rehabilitating patients with hemianopsia (partial blindness). With the support of explainable AI models, you will develop Visual Analytics dashboards for exploring complex data recorded from the training patients including eye tracking, task progress, and success rates. By quantifying model uncertainty, these dashboards will enable therapists to monitor and improve patients’ visual rehabilitation progress. You will collaborate with a diverse project team of academics, clinicians, and software developers to realize the goals of the project.

Your qualities

We are looking for an enthousiastic new colleague who meets several or all of the following criteria:

• Education: a Master's degree in Computer Science or related field, with the ability and willingness to learn new skills as required for the PhD project.
• Data Visualisation: demonstrable experience with data visualisation and building visual analytics dashboards, using a number of appropriate programming languages (e.g., Python, JavaScript), frontend frameworks (e.g., Svelte, Vue), and visualisation libraries (e.g., D3, Vega).
• Background: a solid background in visualisation, visual analytics, machine learning, and explainable AI, including related math and statistics concepts.
• Research: demonstrable interest, motivation, and enthousiasm for independent and team-based scientific research, including collaborative software development.
• Data Science: experience that demonstrates you are able to work in an applied data science context (e.g., collecting, formatting, cleaning, and analysing large amounts of complex data).
• Communication: excellent spoken and written English communication and interpersonal skills, knowledge of spoken and written Dutch is an advantage.

Our offer

We offer:

• a position for four years (1.0 FTE);
• a gross monthly salary between €2,872 and €3,670 in the case of full-time employment (salary scale P under the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities (CAO NU));
• 8% holiday pay and 8.3% year-end bonus;
• a pension scheme, partially paid parental leave and flexible terms of employment based on the CAO NU.