PhD positions in knowledge engineering, Bolzano (Italy)

The Faculty of Computer Science of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (unibz) offers 21 three-year grants for its PhD programme. The KRDB Research Centre for Knowledge and Data of the faculty is looking specifically for candidates suitable for a PhD project titled: 'Strategy and Explainability for Knowledge Bases'.

This research project is about advancing the reasoning with conflicting knowledge, both in the strong sense of inconsistency, and in weaker varieties that involve conceptual clashes, empty concepts, or over-commitments. The general application area is knowledge engineering, in particular providing solutions to the problem of resolving inconsistent information when an agent adds new knowledge to a knowledge base. But additionally, this entails the problem of explaining why a certain combination of knowledge is inconsistent, and it requires explaining or justifying the proposed changes. The project focuses on bringing together three recent strands of research, namely 1) methods to weight information, 2) methods to weaken axioms, and 3) methods to negotiate or play games with information.