Two Year Postgraduate Scholarship in Emotionally Intelligent ICTs for Social Innovation

Two Year Postgraduate Scholarship in Emotionally Intelligent ICTs for Social
Innovation

School of Business
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

As part of an Open Innovation Research Program with global electronics
corporation NEC Japan, Masters by Research scholarships are available for
deserving candidates.

* Background*

Sensemaking is an emerging paradigm for understanding social dynamics in
organisations. It postulates that the process of translating the personal
interpretation, knowledge or meaning into a specific behaviour, decision or
action is moderated by interaction of an individual's rational with their
affective characteristics. It proposes to significantly alter the analysis
and interpretation of data about people, internet users and employees in an
organisation. In general, emotional systems in humans influence many
cognitive processes including decision making, focus and attention, goal
generation and categorization, all of which are important for design of
human-centred intelligent systems.

In this context, ICTs which form an integral part of organisations can be
used as effective tools for social innovation. It is envisaged that
emotionally
intelligent ICTs would play a pivotal role in design of sustainable
organisations in the 21st century by improving the quality of life at work
(e.g., through design of emotionally cohesive and culturally fit teams)
and at home, by provision of emotionally intelligent health care and health
promotion systems (especially for the elderly) to help control spiraling
health care costs, and by facilitating travel and e-tourism through
emotionally intelligent e-tourism systems.

The postgraduate students will be expected to work on the following research
projects

1. Human-centred intelligent system for constructing emotionally cohesive
and culturally fit teams.
2. Emotionally intelligent persuasive dialog system for health promotion.

3. Emotionally intelligent health care (nurse) robot for pre and
post-operative care.
4. Emotionally Intelligent e-tourism system for holiday destination
planning and sight seeing.

The postgraduate students will be supervised by a research team consisting
of researchers from La Trobe university and NEC Corp., Japan. The research
team is headed by La Trobe's Associate Prof. Rajiv Khosla. An annual stipend
of up to AUD 25,000 per annum for 2 years is available from Jan 2009 for
deserving candidates. The annual stipend includes a research internship for
6 months each year (i.e., in 2009 and 2010) at NEC's technologically
advanced research lab in Japan.

*Eligibility Requirements:*

The prospective candidate must have completed a four-year undergraduate
degree in Information Systems, Computer Science or equivalent with an
average of 80% or above. Interested candidates can contact Associate
Prof. Rajiv Khosla (r.khosla@latrobe.edu.au ) directly with your CV,
academic transcripts, .and relevant R&D experience. The candidates must also
include a covering letter with a brief description outlining the research
project they are interested in and relevant skills for the project.

Knowledge in areas like emotional intelligence, natural language processing,
affective computing and human-centred e-tourism would be a benefit.