Postdoc position on Multimodal Conversational AI for Cultural Heritage
Are you interested in developing conversational AI systems that do more than personalize content? Would you like to investigate how AI can support museum visitors in engaging with multiple, diverse, and sometimes contested perspectives? Join us in developing and evaluating multimodal conversational agents for polyvocal museum experiences.
We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher to work on the project Balancing Personalisation and Polyvocality: Dialogic Interaction for Open-mindedness and Empathy in Conversational AI. The project investigates how conversational agents in museum settings can balance personalisation with polyvocality: adapting to individual visitors while also encouraging engagement with unfamiliar, marginalised, or challenging perspectives.
Many current conversational agents and recommender systems adapt content to users’ existing interests and preferences. While this can improve engagement, it may also narrow what users encounter. In museum contexts, this is a particularly important challenge. Museums aim not only to inform and engage visitors, but also to support reflection, openness, empathy, and cross-cultural understanding.
In this project, you will develop and evaluate a multimodal, polyvocal conversational agent. The agent will use real-time visitor feedback, including eye gaze, speech, and dialogue content, to infer interactional states such as engagement, curiosity, openness, confusion, or resistance. These signals will be used to design adaptive dialogue strategies that maintain engagement while introducing diverse perspectives in a meaningful and responsible way.
The position will be embedded in the Human Media Interaction group at the University of Twente and will contribute to the Hybrid Intelligence Centre. You will work in an interdisciplinary research environment at the intersection of conversational AI, human–computer interaction, multimodal interaction, user modelling, and cultural heritage.
As a postdoctoral researcher, you will:
- Conduct research on dialogic interaction, multimodal conversational AI, user modelling, polyvocality, and cultural heritage interpretation;
- Develop and evaluate multimodal models that use gaze, speech, and dialogue data to infer visitor states such as openness, curiosity, engagement, confusion, and resistance;
- Design and compare adaptive dialogue strategies that balance personalization with exposure to diverse perspectives;
- Conduct VR-based user studies to evaluate the effects of adaptive dialogue strategies on engagement, openness, curiosity, empathy, and reflection;
- Contribute to reusable experimental infrastructure, datasets, evaluation methods, and software components;
- Publish research results in high-quality international journals and conferences;
- Collaborate with researchers, a PhD candidate working on polyvocal knowledge representation, curators, museum professionals, and other partners in the Hybrid Intelligence network.
Information and application
Are you interested in this position? Please send your application via the 'Apply now' button below before August 10, 2026, and include:
- A curriculum vitae, including a list of publications;
- A motivation letter explaining your interest in the position and how your background fits the project;
- Contact details of two academic references.
For more information regarding this position, you are welcome to contact (Shenghui Wang via the following email address: shenghui.wang@utwente.nl).
Screening is part of the selection process
About the organisation
The faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) uses mathematics, electronics and computer technology to contribute to the development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). With ICT present in almost every device and product we use nowadays, we embrace our role as contributors to a broad range of societal activities and as pioneers of tomorrow's digital society. As part of a tech university that aims to shape society, individuals and connections, our faculty works together intensively with industrial partners and researchers in the Netherlands and abroad, and conducts extensive research for external commissioning parties and funders. Our research has a high profile both in the Netherlands and internationally. It has been accommodated in three multidisciplinary UT research institutes: Mesa+ Institute, TechMed Centre and Digital Society Institute.
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