Machines and artificial intelligence and communication with them will become more and more part of our everyday lives in the future: in the car, at IT trade fairs, in the living room, and at work. What does this have to do with Dr. Maria Staudte? When we interact with machines, we learn a lot about our human behaviour. And it is precisely this human-machine interaction that fascinates Maria Staudte as a researcher and research manager.
From robots in Saarland to bidt in Bavaria
In Saarland — the second-smallest federal state in Germany — Maria Staudte studied computational linguistics, gained a doctorate in cognitive science, and later researched and taught as a junior research group leader, particularly in the field of language. She was particularly fascinated by the diversity of disciplines and the highly experimental approach.
“How do people process language, and how do they interact with machines? Facial expressions, gestures and gaze behaviour, in combination with the right timing, also play a major role in communication between individuals. For example, I worked extensively with eye tracking in the experiments,” says Staudte. A robot or virtual agent that explains an issue on the audio track but looks away at an inappropriate moment for its counterpart irritates people. Incongruent behaviour sometimes even leads to a loss of trust in the machine. “Sometimes it takes mistakes in otherwise smooth communication to understand how it works.”
From research to science management
In 2020, Maria Staudte moved from Saarland to Munich and from research to science management. She joined the bidt team as research coordinator for junior research programmes focusing on promoting doctoral students. “What appealed to me about the new challenge at the time was that the bidt’s promotion of young researchers was being reorganised in cooperation with the Bavarian Ministry of Science. This offered great opportunities for development and organisation. With the help of my own experience in research and supervision, I can contribute to further improving training and funding formats, especially for doctoral students, in Bavaria.”
After more than 15 years in research, she has been a research coordinator for a good four years now. During this time, Staudte has achieved a great deal in collaboration with her colleagues and the bidt team.
With the Graduate Centre, we create opportunities for interdisciplinary networking.
Dr. Maria Staudte To the profile
New young talent programme launched — research network established
In 2022, the graduate programme was relaunched: The bidt coordinates and supervises the Graduate Centre, among other things.
“Our tasks include organising the selection process for those receiving funding and designing the training and coaching programmes. With the Graduate Centre, we create opportunities for interdisciplinary networking and offer a wide range of support for doctoral candidates,” says Staudte. She particularly remembers the Graduate Centre’s kick-off event. “It was a great experience to see how the young academics exchanged ideas and networked. After two years of intensive work, you had the feeling that something new was starting.”
For Staudte, however, the topic of networking is actually part of everyday life and does not end in the bidt’s own ranks — in 2023, the bidt, the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) and the Weizenbaum Institute (WI) for the Networked Society (WI) developed a joint qualification programme to promote their young scientists.
“The fact that our young talents can now benefit from all three major digitalisation institutes, from agile research to science communication, and can also network across Germany via the DigiMeet event, for example, is something I consider to be an immense advantage of our funding,” Staudte sums up.
Interdisciplinarity is key
Her professional biography has always been characterised by interdisciplinarity, which is also a trump card for doctoral students: the topics they are researching range from hate speech in social networks to — precisely — human-machine interaction. She is also involved in a research group between bidt, CAIS and WI on the criteria for successful interdisciplinary research. It, therefore, seems more than fitting that Staudte is now also closely accompanying the establishment of the new 2024 research focus on “Humans and Generative Artificial Intelligence: Trust in Co-Creation”. In her, the researchers have a highly experienced sparring partner at their side who can “read” both humans and machines.
