ITU researcher awarded Villum Synergy grant for qualitative data project

ITU researcher awarded Villum Synergy grant for qualitative data project

Associate Professor at IT University of Copenhagen, Anna Rogers, and Associate Professor Hjalmar Carlsen at University of Copenhagen have received a Villum Synergy grant from Villum Fonden to develop a new tool for conducting large-scale, high-quality qualitative interviews.

Anna RogersCollaborationsComputer Science DepartmentResearchdata sciencegrants

Written 15 October, 2024 08:06 by Theis Duelund Jensen

Associate Professor at ITU, Anna Rogers (an expert in Transformer-based language models and machine reasoning), and Associate Professor Hjalmar Carlsen at University of Copenhagen (an expert in mixed methods in social sciences), have been awarded a Villum Synergy grant from Villum Fonden to develop a new tool for conducting large-scale, high-quality qualitative interviews. The project is titled AInterviewer: a framework for using Generative AI to collect large-scale qualitative interview data.

The AInterviewer project aims to address a critical gap in social science research: the difficulty of collecting large-scale qualitative data. By harnessing the cutting-edge large language models (LLMs), the researchers will create a framework that can facilitate in-depth interviews with a vast number of participants. This will enable researchers to gather rich, nuanced data on a wide range of topics. The project is a collaboration between experts in computer science and social sciences, ensuring that the AInterviewer is both technically sound and truly represents an advance in the methodology for social sciences.

"I am very excited about this project, because it's a chance to innovate in a very high-impact area, both scientifically and socially," says Anna Rogers. "It is also a rare chance to really work across disciplinary boundaries and take the time to learn from each other."

The AInterviewer will be applied to a case study of Danish citizens' opinions towards the green transition, providing valuable insights into public attitudes and preferences. The researchers hope that the data collected through the AInterviewer would yield new insights, which could be used to inform data-driven policies and contribute to a more sustainable future.

About Villum Fonden
Villum Fonden is a Danish foundation that supports technical and natural science research and education, as well as environmental, social, and cultural initiatives. With annual grants of approximately DKK 600 million, Villum Fonden is one of Denmark's largest contributors to technical and natural science research.

Further information

Theis Duelund Jensen, Press Officer, phone +45 2555 0447, email