Post doc position cognitive ergonomy, experimental psychology, neurosciences

We are inviting applications for one postdoctoral position on the Evaluation of an Adaptive Training Virtual Environment at Heudiasyc Lab CNRS (https://www.hds.utc.fr/).

Context
Feedback selection is a major issue for intelligent virtual environments for training. Expert knowledge provides useful insight, but it can be difficult to collect. Furthermore, the influence of a specific type of feedback may vary across trainees and over training, which is rarely reflected in expert knowledge. As part of an automatic gesture training system, we modelled the co-evolution between a trainee and a training environment. We consider trainees by their levels in every dimensions of the task, and the training environment as the relevance of every element in its set of feedback. Over time, this co-evolution is reflected by trainee successive performances, and changes in the feedback selection. We model these interactions as a multi-armed bandit problem, each arm representing a type of feedback. This allows to adapt feedback selection only relying on the interactions between the trainee and the training environment, without any prior knowledge. Combining the trainee and the set of feedback in a single representation space, we show how our model can provide useful indicators regarding trainees progression and feedback relevance.

Objective

The goal of this post-doc is to evaluate the impact of adaptation in training virtual environments. We believe that co-evolution based on the enaction theory has a positive impact on training. The candidate will design an experiment in order to validate the model. Two platforms are available to conduct this experiment: a 2D platform (PhD Remy Frenoy) and a 3D platform (extension of the model in a CAVE). One major issue is the role of feedback for controlling the interaction. A second issue is the impact of giving an importance to errors in training, in order to propose a flexible, personalized and easy of use training.


The position is for two years, starting before 15th December 2016. The successful candidate will join the Heudiasyc research team
(https://www.hds.utc.fr/).) at the CNRS premises within the Campus of the UTC (http://www.utc.fr/the_university/index.php), in Compiegne, France. The research activity will be carried out under the supervision of Indira Thouvenin (http://www.hds.utc.fr/~ithouven