Background:

Our workforce characteristic has changed tremendously, particularly after COVID, and is evolving to be one operated in Isolated, Confined & Extreme (ICE) conditions of space. Interpersonal conflicts are on the rise, impacting team performance, particularly when setting common group goals & preferences. Conflict resolution assistants – such as a powerful group visualization tools, might help understand goals of other team members in a transparent manner. Generative AI is also a promising tool – to automatically summarize chat histories, to detect knowledge gaps, or even detect states of conflict situations in a team¹.

Project:

The thesis is in the framework of the Future Fields 3 activity – Decision-making in Hybrid Adaptive Systems (https://hybrid-adaptive-systems.org)- The project consortium aims at understanding and designing hybrid adaptive systems (as a combination of social and technological elements) with a special focus on preferences and expectations – in video collaborative settings. The project aims to study how individuals, teams, and organizations interact with adaptive IT systems in the areas of work and life.

Objectives:

In this work, we aim to develop two conflict resolution assistants 1) a group-goal visualizing tool – using spider graphs – to specify own and visualize preferences of others in a goal-setting task and 2) a generative AI assistant, that detects, summarizes conflict states in a team goal-setting task using textual data. In the thesis, the student will design and develop an experiment for goal setting in teams using one or more of the above assistants. The impact of these digital assistants will then be assessed – such as group performance and team cohesion. Suitable integrations for visualization, and/or ChatGPT in a video meeting Jitsi Meet² (e.g. Symbl.ai) will have to be analyzed and integrated as a plugin in the Jitsi Meet tool. A preliminary pilot study can be conducted (in the KD2 lab), to identify treatment effects and whether the conflict resolution assistants are indeed effective.

Requirements:

• Good programming skills (Javascript / REST)
• Preliminary experience working with Open-Source APIs
• Basics of Economic and/or Information Systems Experiment & survey-design principles (preferred)
• A curious & innovative Mindset
• A Bachelor / Master thesis can be written on this topic

Formalities:

The thesis can be written in German or English. Please apply with a short letter of motivation (max. ½ page), your CV, and a current grade transcript.
Work can commence immediately.

[1] https://symbl.ai/developers/blog/integrate-conversation-intelligence-communication-stack/

[2] https://meet.jit.si/