On October 13, Anita Slonimska from the Max Planck Institute will present during the bi-weekly SignLab Seminar. Here is the abstract of her talk:
Communicative efficiency, defined as the optimization of the cost–benefit trade-off in communication, has been central to understanding language structure and use (Levshina, 2022). Yet prevailing accounts have largely treated language as a unimodal and static system, focusing almost exclusively on written corpora or speech. Such approaches overlook an ongoing paradigmatic shift in our understanding of language, driven by insights into how language is actually used in interaction: multimodally and adaptively (Hagoort & Ozyurek, 2025; Holler & Bavelas, 2017). Drawing particularly on recent and ongoing work on sign languages, as well as on co-speech and silent gesture, I propose a theoretical framework that reconceptualizes communicative efficiency as an adaptive property of language use, one that flexibly exploits the expressive affordances of communicative systems, including time and space, sequentiality and simultaneity, arbitrary and iconic form–meaning mappings, and acoustic and visual modalities. I argue that communicative efficiency cannot be understood without accounting for the multimodal and adaptive nature of language. Building on these insights, I outline a multimodal communicative efficiency framework and discuss how it opens up new directions for future research, which I look forward to exploring with the audience.
We are pleased to report that Patrick Lederer, postdoc in the Computational Social Choice Group at the ILLC, and his coauthors received a Distinguished Paper Award at the 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), held in Bremen, Germany, this August. It was one of three distinguished papers, selected from over 5,000 submissions to the conference. Congratulations!
Patrick's work concerns the problem of designing a good budget allocation rule that can be used to decide how much of a common budget to assign to each of several projects, based on the preferences reported by a number of individuals. While it is known to be mathematically impossible to design a rule that meets all of the criteria one might look for in such a setting—such as being fair to individuals and incentivising them to report their own preferences truthfully—the paper shows that surprisingly positive results are within reach if we are willing to slightly relax the requirement of incentivising truthfulness. Specifically, it turns out that there in fact are good rules that do not disincentivise misreporting of preferences entirely but that instead bound the benefits anyone might reap from misreporting.
A preprint of Patrick's paper, entitled "Approximate Strategyproofness in Approval-Based Budget Division", is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11736.
Annually, the General Association for Linguistics (AVT) and the Dutch Association for Applied Linguistics (Anéla) award a prize for the best PhD dissertation in the field of linguistics.
For the AVT/Anéla PhD dissertation award 2026, all PhD dissertations defended at a Dutch University between 16 July 2025 and 15 July 2026 are eligible. See the website for the submission form and more information.
The KHMW Young Talent Awards 2026 recognize outstanding students in science and technology at Dutch universities. The program includes 18 Graduation Awards (€1,000–€3,000 each) for exceptional master’s theses or research reports and 68 Incentive Awards of €500 each reward top first-year students (2024/2025) in fields like Artificial Intelligence, Engineering, and Mathematics.
The KHMW Responsible Internet Thesis Awards recognize outstanding master’s theses addressing the future of a safer, more accessible, and better-governed internet. Two prizes are awarded annually: a first prize of €3,000 and a second prize of €1,000. Nominations for the 2026 edition are open for students graduating in the 2025/2026 academic year at a Dutch university.
Applicants should demonstrate excellent research achievements either in a subject in the humanities with a focus on information science and computational literary studies or in information science and digital humanities with a strong emphasis on the humanities perspective. An integral component of the position’s profile are competences in the field of developing methods and infrastructure solutions for machine-based exploration and analysis of analogue.
The position also entails tasks relating to research-based teaching (2 hours per week) within the competences of the professorship and the MA specialization Digital Humanities at the Faculty of Humanities.
Assistant Professor Machine Learning for Formal Reasoning and Verification University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
Deadline: 7 October 2026
The TCS-group of the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) at the University of Amsterdam is looking for an Assistant Professor to work on machine learning for formal reasoning and verification.
The position of Assistant Professor (Universitair Docent, UD) will be embedded within the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC). The ILLC promotes curiosity-driven research and serves as a meeting point for computer scientists from traditional research fields ranging from AI, computer science, and mathematics to linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy.
We are seeking candidates working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and formal reasoning. Relevant areas include, but are not limited to, automated reasoning, interactive theorem proving systems, formal verification, formalized mathematics, neuro-symbolic methods, and AI-assisted mathematical or logical reasoning.
We particularly welcome candidates whose work connects modern AI and machine learning with formal proof systems, interactive theorem provers, or proof assistants such as Lean, Rocq, or Isabelle. At the same time, we also encourage applications from researchers whose work engages more broadly with logic, reasoning, and theoretical computer science.
More information: https://www.illc.uva.nl/NewsandEvents/News/Positions/newsitem/16310/Assistant-Professor-Machine-Learning-for-Formal-Reasoning-and-Verification
Written on my phone, apologies for typos.
Applications must be received before 7 October, 2026
There is a vacancy for a PhD position in information science at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies. The position is for a fixed-term period of 4 years, of which 25% will be dedicated to teaching, supervision and administrative tasks at the Department.
The PhD project is situated within the research area of logics for multi-agent systems, and their applications to formal verification, synthesis, normative reasoning, mechanism design, analysis of social phenomena, and so on. The logics in question include, but are not limited to, logics for reasoning about agents' strategies, actions, knowledge, beliefs, abilities, etc. The project will be conducted within the Logic and Artificial Intelligence (LAI) research group. The exact scope and focus of the project can be adapted to the candidate's interests.
The objective of the thesis will be to investigate verification and synthesis methods for dynamic Multi-Agent Systems, based on formalisms such as the Alternating-time Temporal Logic. Directions explored will include designing efficient model-checking algorithms, determining their complexity bounds, and developing synthesis methods for computing repairs.
The student will conduct their thesis at the Paris North Computer Science Laboratory (LIPN). The expected starting date is March 2026 (negotiable). Applications should be sent directly to Munyque Mittelmann. Please don't hesitate to contact us for more information.
The Department of Computer Science at TU Braunschweig is establishing a research group on Formal Methods for Trustworthy Systems and AI, offering several PhD positions. Topics of interest include formal verification, symbolic methods, and automated reasoning, with applications in AI and explainability.
Interested candidates are requested to send their application directly to Clemens Dubslaff, head of the group.
The AI Grand Est ENACT cluster, led by the University of Lorraine and the University of Strasbourg together with CNRS, Inria, Inserm, awards half- and fully-funded PhD contracts in AI-related topics, open to all disciplinary fields including the humanities and social sciences. A full fellowship covers three years of PhD salary plus €10,000 in research expenses; a half-fellowship, which should be combined with another funding source, covers half the salary plus €5,000.
The Archives Henri Poincaré is a joint research unit between the CNRS, the Université de Lorraine, and the Université de Strasbourg, with sites in Nancy and Strasbourg, working on the history and philosophy of science in a broad sense. It is one of the ENACT cluster's priority research units, and the programme can accordingly fund PhD projects in logic and philosophy that engage with AI, whether in their topic or in their methodology. We are particularly interested in projects on AI and mathematics approached from the standpoint of logic and the philosophy of mathematics, though proposals connecting AI to other areas of logic and philosophy are equally welcome. Prospective PhD students interested in developing a project along these lines should get in touch with Yacin Hamami, sufficiently early to leave time to develop a suitable research project before the topic-submission deadline.
Matteo Fabbri - Lianhe Zaobao, 15 September 2026
Matteo recently spoke to a Singaporean newspaper about his research in the context of a new Australian regulatory draft on user control of algorithmic recommendations on social media.
For a deeper insight into the issue, please read his recent co-authored article on the same topic, titled "Feeding the (short-video) feed: a design proposal for user control of social media recommender systems under the Digital Services Act" (follow this link).