Don’t Forget the Forgotten! ‘Towards a Platform-Based Approach for Sustainable Employment of Workers with a Disability’ addresses the challenge of limited sustainable employment opportunities for workers with disabilities (i.e., a healthy, productive, and meaningful career) by designing and implementing online labor platform cooperatives, and underlying matching algorithms, to foster the sustainable employment and inclusion of individuals with a disability. It is an NWO KIC Missie call ‘Meedoen op de arbeidsmarkt’ (Participating in the labor market) project which started in 2024 and will run until 2030. It is led by Dr. Jeroen Meijerink from the BMS faculty at University of Twente and funds among others three PhD positions, one of which (WP2) at the Human Media Interaction department.
Knowledge Representation & Responsible Design for Inclusive Employment Matching Algorithms
In this PhD project, carried out by Luotong Cheng and co-supervised by Dr. Joschka Hüllmann, Dr. Jeroen Meijerink, and myself, we build on the notion that existing matching algorithms and domain models insufficiently address the characteristics of workers with a disability. The project aims to develop novel knowledge representations (ontologies) that better capture these aspects. We will employ an empirical and participatory approach to elicit requirements for the knowledge representation frameworks via data collection from relevant stakeholders. The requirements are used to design a novel domain-specific ontology that mathematically captures relevant worker characteristics and their relations regarding employee competencies, interests, values, and vulnerabilities. The ontology is the basis for building a novel matching algorithm that emphasises the inclusion of workers with a disability.