The ongoing digitalization in society has a disqualifying effect on those who are not acquainted with or able to make use of digital interfaces. An intelligent voice assistant that guides the user through steps in a digital procedure can offer a low-threshold addition to human support for this target group, that has yet never been investigated before. The aim of this project is to tailor-make such a system for digital illiterates and test its potential with the target group to ultimately improve their sense of autonomy and participation in society.

• dr. Tijmen Baarda
• Pepijn Stoop
• Mees van Stiphout MA
• Sheean Spoel

Organizations invest in AI to improve customer service. But users perceive chat conversations as unnatural and employees struggle with collaborating with AI. In the Smooth Operator project robust conversational AI will be developed as cooperative communication partners that personalize conversations in a human way within several business contexts. We therefore take a multidisciplinary perspective (i.e., technological component of AI development and social effects on users) with a mixed-methods approach (i.e. corpus analysis, machine learning, field experiments). Research will be conducted in the customer service context, where data can be obtained that match the confounding factors, and both employees and customers can be examined.

The project leads to cutting-edge scientific-based algorithms, lexica, guidelines and tailored customers'profiles for designing and implementing effective personalized conversational AI. Furthermore, the knowledge utilization is strongly focused on making employees AI-savvy and optimizes their abilities in a challenging human-AI environment. 

• prof. dr. Hans Hoeken
• dr. Charlotte van Hooijdonk
• Gabriëlla Martijn

• prof. dr. Hedwig te Molder

Viewpoints of others make you wiser. Discussion sections on news websites, however, bring together a tangle of, not always constructive, opinions. In this project we will study discussions on Nu.nl and develop technology to assemble the variation of messages and presents them insightfully with the most constructive posts per viewpoint.

• prof. dr. Antal van den Bosch

• Emiel Krahmer
• Ernst van den Heuvel
• Liesje van der Linden
• Cedric Waterschoot