Variment receives 2.3M NOK in funding from the Norwegian Research Council for Industrial Ph.D project

About the Industrial Ph.D scheme

Under the Industrial PhD scheme, a company collaborates with a university or university college on a doctoral project. The doctoral project is carried out by an employee and must be of clear relevance to the company’s activities.

An Industrial PhD project culminates in concrete research and development results that enhance the company’s core activity, products and/or services.

Variment’s Ph.D project

The project is carried out by our AI Engineer Minh Man in collaboration with the University of Southeastern Norway, with the title Adaptive Multi-Party Clinical Dialogue Modelling for Healthcare Communication Training. 

Healthcare communication training requires learners to manage emotionally complex conversations involving not only patients, but also concerned family members. Most existing digital training systems simplify communication into scripted one-to-one interactions, providing limited realism and little understanding of how AI-generated healthcare conversations should be designed, evaluated, and governed. This project investigates the quality of synthetic healthcare conversations generated by agentic AI systems for communication training. The project will develop an adaptive multi-agent simulation system in which virtual patients and family members interact dynamically with healthcare learners during difficult clinical conversations. Rather than relying on fixed dialogue scripts, the system will generate and adapt conversations based on learner’s behaviors, emotional context, and pedagogical objectives.

The research focuses on three dimensions: (1) the design of adaptive multi-party clinical conversation approaches, (2) the quality, realism, and emotional coherence of AI-generated synthetic healthcare conversations and (3) the educational effectiveness and trustworthy use of adaptive conversational simulations in healthcare communication training. The system will incorporate specialized AI agents responsible for patient behavior, family member interaction, pedagogical adaptation, and safety monitoring. The system will be iteratively designed and evaluated with healthcare professionals and learners through expert reviews and pilot studies.

The project aims to generate new knowledge about how agentic AI systems can support the creation of realistic, adaptive, emotionally coherent and pedagogically meaningful healthcare conversations. Beyond healthcare, the project will contribute to emerging research on synthetic conversation quality, adaptive multi-agent conversational systems, trustworthy and responsible AI, and AI-supported professional communication training.

Links

The Research Council of Norway: https://www.forskningsradet.no/en/financing/what/industrial-phd/

Regjeringen.no: https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/55-millioner-til-doktorgrader-i-naringslivet/id3166363/