PhD position @ TU Delft, The Netherlands - Declarative & Semantic Modelling for PTSD

PhD position at

Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Duration of contract: 4 years
Salary scale: €2062 to €2638 per month gross

Apply before: August 1st, 2013 (details at http://goo.gl/q8UuE)


JOB DESCRIPTION

The candidate will participate in the "Virtual eCoaching and Storytelling
technology for post-traumatic stress disorder treatment (VESP)" project,
which studies how effective a stand-alone, multi-modal memory
restructuring
(3MR) system and an Internet-based, guided self-therapy system could be
used for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients.
The main goal of this PhD project is to investigate how a storytelling
framework could use declarative and semantic methods for enabling patients
to easily re-create an experience via a virtual environment for
therapeutic
purposes. Among other tasks, the PhD student will investigate (1) desired
object semantics and associations for virtual reality exposure therapy
(VRET) environments, (2) how to integrate procedural techniques and
non-intrusive interactive methods, and (3) methods to support the
declarative creation of scenarios and their consistency maintenance.
The project will combine new techniques with existing, in-house algorithms
and systems, e.g. procedural methods, solvers, and libraries. Within the
VESP team, the candidate will work closely together with two other PhD
students, who will respectively (1) investigate how to establish a virtual
coach that assists in the treatment execution, and (2) design and conduct
two Randomized Controlled Trials to evaluate the efficacy of PTSD
treatment
systems.   


REQUIREMENTS

You have a university MSc degree in computer science, human-computer
interaction or a related area, with excellent grades. Experience with
computer graphics and game technology is a plus. You have excellent
programming skills in languages such as C#, C++ and Python, and have a
passion for game technology and (serious) gaming. You have excellent
communication skills, and a good mastery of both spoken and written
English. You have a creative mind and are an excellent player in a
multi-disciplinary team that spans areas such as human-computer
interaction, computer graphics, serious gaming, and clinical psychology.

The project will be mainly performed within the Computer Graphics and
Visualization Group, which has more than 25 years of experience in
research
in a wide range of topics in computer graphics, visualization, game
technology, augmented/virtual reality, and geometric modeling.

For more details, see http://goo.gl/q8UuE

For information on this position, contact: R.Bidarra@tudelft.nl