Autonomy in the Attention Economy
Awarded NIAA grant for an interdisciplinary project to investigate misalignments between users' perceptions of their digital behaviour and the reality, and how this compares with …
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Bio
Lize is an assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, working in the AI & Behaviour lab in the Department of Computer Science. She is affiliated with the Netherlands’ Hybrid Intelligence Centre and supervises PhD research on personalising AI dialogue agents for effective behavioural support. She is a research associate at the Unit for the Ethics of Technology at Stellenbosch University, as well as an associate editor of the upcoming Cambridge University Press (CUP) book series on AI Ethics & Society.
Lize has a strong interdisciplinary background, having published and taught across fields as diverse as human-centered AI, computational linguistics, behavioural design, philosophy, social anthropology, and cognitive science. During her doctorate, she worked at Google as a student researcher on contextualising the alignment of social AI agents, contributing foundational research to the growing area of research now termed socioaffective alignment. A seminal paper from her thesis characterising social dark patterns investigates early examples of emotional manipulation by digital social agents and their effects on users.
She obtained her DPhil in Computer Science from the University of Oxford, focusing on the ethics of human-AI social interaction. Her master’s focused on supporting multi-modal grounded language learning in AI, drawing from 4E/embodied cognition theories in cognitive science. She has published in several top-rated journals, collaborating with industry and academia researchers from across the world.
At the VU, Lize co-designed and coordinates a unique interdisciplinary course on the cognitive and environmental factors that shape human behaviour; methods and tools for computationally modelling these factors, and the responsible application of behavioural science in the design of AI and computing systems.
More information about her projects, background and mission can be found on her CV, Google Scholar, and below.
Education
D.Phil. Computer Science
University of Oxford
M.A. (Thesis) Philosophy | Cognitive & Computational Linguistics
Stellenbosch University
B.A. (Honours) Philosophy
Stellenbosch University, University of Bristol
B.A. Humanities
NWU Potchefstroom
Topics
Human-Centred AI
Behavioural Design & Psychology
Human-Agent Interaction Ethics
LLM Evaluation & Alignment
Computational Linguistics
Philosophy of Language & Cognition
Recent Projects
Behaviour Change Support with KG-Enhanced LLMs
Investigating the effect of integrating a knowledge graph (KG) as user 'mental model' into a large language model (LLM) based dialogue agent for personalised behaviour change …
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Benchmarking Personalised LLM Agent Alignment
Developed benchmark and pipeline to evaluate large language models' ability to attend to and appropriately handle user-specific safety-critical context in recommendations.
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Mission Statement
A primary concern of my research is individual empowerment; designing technologies to help people achieve their goals effectively, while ensuring designers treat people (and their unique needs and capacities) with the respect they deserve.
My research approach is human-centred in that it always starts with identifying specific problems from users’ own perspectives, and trying to find the most effective and responsible ways to address them, rather than starting with a tool and trying to find ways to sell or utilise it. I am constantly seeking to challenge my existing knoweldge and assumptions by reading broadly and learning new techniques to find the most appropriate and ethical routes to addressing the issues I care about. My aim is to maximise the benefits of AI and digitisation while minimising unecessary technological dependence and unintended risks.
My research integrates psychological theory and critical, big-picture thinking with domain-specific empirical research and user-centred interaction design. Informed by my social scientific background and upbringing in a deeply unequal developing country, critically assessing how technologies impacts society and basic human rights is an essential aspect of my work.