Postdoc position on Multimodal Conversational AI for Cultural Heritage University of Twente in Netherlands

University of Twente is offering a postdoctoral position on Multimodal Conversational AI for Cultural Heritage in the Human Media Interaction group, within the broader Hybrid Intelligence Centre. The project, Balancing Personalisation and Polyvocality: Dialogic Interaction for Open-mindedness and Empathy in Conversational AI, explores how museum conversational agents can adapt to individual visitors while still exposing them to unfamiliar, marginalised, or challenging perspectives.

The research sits at the intersection of conversational AI, human-computer interaction, multimodal interaction, user modelling, and cultural heritage. The successful candidate will develop and evaluate a multimodal, polyvocal conversational agent that uses visitor feedback such as eye gaze, speech, and dialogue content to infer interactional states like engagement, curiosity, openness, confusion, and resistance. These signals will support adaptive dialogue strategies designed to maintain engagement while broadening what visitors encounter in a responsible and meaningful way.

The postdoctoral researcher will conduct research on dialogic interaction, multimodal conversational AI, user modelling, polyvocality, and cultural heritage interpretation; build and test multimodal models; design adaptive dialogue strategies; run VR-based user studies; contribute datasets, reusable experimental infrastructure, evaluation methods, and software components; publish in high-quality journals and conferences; and collaborate with researchers, museum professionals, curators, a PhD candidate, and partners in the Hybrid Intelligence network.

Applicants should hold a PhD in computer science, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, computational social science, digital humanities, cognitive science, or a related discipline. Experience with conversational AI, dialogue systems, adaptive systems, multimodal interaction, or empirical user studies is expected. Strong analytical and academic writing skills, independence, teamwork, and excellent English communication are also required. Desirable experience includes eye tracking, speech analysis, affective computing, VR experiments, reinforcement learning, knowledge graphs, semantic technologies, or cultural heritage and museum-related research.

The appointment is for 1 year full-time, with the possibility of extension for 2 additional years after positive evaluation. Salary is in line with the Dutch CAO-NU agreement, with a gross monthly salary between €3,546 and €5,538 depending on experience and qualifications. Benefits include an 8% holiday allowance, an 8.3% year-end bonus, a pension scheme, partial home working, campus sports access, and strong research and professional development support.

The application deadline is 2026-08-16. Applicants should submit a CV including publications, a motivation letter, and the contact details of two academic references through the online application button.