In this internship you get the opportunity to develop a state of the art method to generate explanations about the behaviour of autonomous systems. With this you will be one of the first in the world to develop such a method. The use case is an urban search and rescue operation where pairs of a human and an autonomous system (e.g. a drone) have to locate and rescue victims. The explanation method you help to develop will be able to generate explanations of why the system is doing what it is doing or why it is making certain plan suggestions towards its human team partner.
You will do this research in a small team of Explainable AI (XAI) experts that includes psychologists, data scientists and AI researchers. Through discussions and brainstorm sessions you get the chance to contribute your unique ideas and point of view. In addition you extend the existing task simulation to add more complexity and implement the XAI method. In the end our focus is to do a real-time experiment with the simulation and the XAI method to assess its effects on task performance and understanding. You will implement your explanation method in TNO’s toolbox for XAI, to guarantee that your method will be used by other researches and TNO partners across industries. In addition we will support and motivate you to write a research paper out of this work.
Your internship will take place within the Perceptual & Cognitive Systems department of TNO, within the Human-Agent/Robot Teaming (HART) group. Our group exists out of 16 enthusiastic researchers that focus on connecting humans with AI, whether physical (e.g., robots or teleoperation) or virtual (decision support systems or e-partners). Specifically within the field of Explainable AI we not only develop state of the art methods, but also validate them with actual end-users.
Our department is located at TNO Soesterberg, which often organises activities such as drinks, laser-gaming, board game nights, and more. In addition, you will have the opportunity to informally meet and work with TNO researchers but also other interns.
For this vacancy it is required that the AIVD issues a security clearance after conducting a security screening. Please visit for more information the AIVD website.
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