Laura Spillner

Laura Spillner ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Digital Media Lab. Sie hat Medienwissenschaft und Digitale Medien studiert und anschlie?end einen Master in Informatik an der Universit?t Bremen absolviert, mit dem Schwerpunkt Künstliche Intelligenz, Kognition und Robotik. In ihrer Masterarbeit besch?ftigte sie sich mit natürlicher Sprachverarbeitung und Conversational Agents.
Laura arbeitet im Projekt "ComAI" im Bereich P2, Nutzerzentrierte Kommunikative KI.
Im Rahmen dieses Projektes und ihrer Doktorarbeit erforscht sie die Interaktion mit KI in natürlicher Sprache, und die Entwicklung von erkl?rbaren Algorithmen (explainable AI) und Hybrid AI im Bereich der Sprachverarbeitung.

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Looking for a student job? 

I'm currently looking for a student research assistant to help with developing chatbots and running user studies. This position is in our project ComAI which is about user-centered communicative AI. In this project, we are investigating how different features of conversational agents - including UI features, interaction design decisions, and linguistic/paralinguistic features - impact the interaction users have with such agents, like their perception of the AI agent and their trust in it. Some experience would be required:

• either in the area of language understanding and generation in python
• or in developing web interfaces
• OR you have very good programming experience in other areas, and are quick to learn new tools!

This position can be extended for up to four years. If you're interested, write me an email or come by my office!

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Research Interests and Thesis Topics:

• Natural language understanding: e.g. instruction parsing, topic modelling, understanding different points of view and political narratives in social media texts
• Visualization for NLU: e.g. interactive topic networks or narrative graphs, visualizing meaning in word embeddings
• Human-AI-Interaction: e.g. explaining AI predictions or agent behaviour, teaching intelligent agents new knowledge, natural language interaction
• Conversational agents: e.g. conversational user interfaces, linguistic and paralinguistic features and their impact on user interactions

I currently have open thesis projects in these two areas (24.01.2025):

• natural language interaction/conversational user interfaces: how do changes in language impact user interaction - e.g. can you use language cues to signify how certain or uncertain an AI is in its answers? Can AI use humor effectively? How can language be personalized to a user?
• explainable AI: if AI is able to explain its reasoning to a user, how does the presentation of the explanation (e.g. natural language vs. graphical, confidence of the AI, etc) influence users' behaviour? How do users interact with AI explanations, how much do they even read them? 

I have a few pre-defined topics which will generally involve programming and a user study, or you can come up with your own topic in these general areas.