Role Summary

The g group at Idiap seeks a highly motivated PhD student to join an innovative French–Swiss SNSF project (AIMANT) focused on developing advanced social-AI models for behavior understanding in the context of autism early screening, diagnosis, and monitoring.

While significant progress has been made in activity and non-verbal behavior recognition, current methods still struggle with adult–child interactions captured in (close to) naturalistic conditions, such as those encountered in autism assessment sessions (ADOS, ESCS). These challenges arise from the complexity and subtlety of the target behaviors, including gesture- and attention-related cues (, gaze, pointing, manipulation), infant micro-expressions, and motor stereotypes.

This PhD project aims to develop next-generation multi-behavior coordination models (face and body gestures, gaze, audio, semantics) with temporal interpretation, at both the individual and interaction (c...