Franziska Burger
Senior researcher at the research group for Media, Innovation and Contemporary Technologies, Department of Industrial Systems Engineering and Product Design, Ghent University.
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Fran(ziska) Burger is a postdoctoral researcher in the design.nexus and imec-mict research groups. She has obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science (Universität Tübingen) and Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence (Radboud University Nijmegen).
Her research interest lies in improving the quality of life of vulnerable individuals through technology. She discovered this during an internship at MBRDNA in Silicon Valley, where she worked on keeping drivers safe while using the in-vehicle infotainment system. In her Master's thesis, she went on to develop a self-disclosure module for a NAO-robot to strengthen the bond between the robot and children with Type I diabetes as part of the Horizon 2020 PAL project.
Fran successfully defended her doctoral dissertation titled “Supporting Electronic Mental Health with Artificial Intelligence: Thought Record Analysis and Guidance” in December of 2022. From a literature review on ehealth systems for depression treatment that systems, she gained the insight that systems lack reciprocity (the user provides a lot of information while getting little back from the system). So, she developed a chatbot to engage users in thought recording. Using a set of recurrent neural networks the chatbot was able to analyze these thought records and give in-depth feedback. Her research work culminated in four open-access journal articles and associated datasets.
Since her PhD, Fran completed two part-time postdocs at TU Delft and TU Eindhoven respectively.