PhD student position on non-monotonic reasoning for personal agents, Twente (The Netherlands)

Digital information technologies should align with the user'€™s needs and values. To achieve this, personal agents need to model the user'€™s informational and motivational attitudes such as goals, values, norms, beliefs, and their interrelations in order to derive support actions that are aligned with the user. We offer a fully funded 4-year PhD position to investigate how non-monotonic reasoning techniques such as belief revision, argumentation, defeasible reasoning, inconsistency handling, and reasoning about actions can be employed for user modelling in the context of personal agents. Questions that can be addressed are for example: Which types of update operations on user models are required? Is a new norm in conflict with existing desired behaviors? Can belief revision techniques be adapted for run-time norm revision? With this we lay the foundations for flexible and value-aligned personal agents that give people agency over their lives with digital technology.

The position is associated with the Hybrid Intelligence Centre, a 10-year Dutch national research program which investigates how we can create AI that augments, instead of replaces human intelligence. The position is embedded in the Human Media Interaction (HMI) department at University of Twente. HMI is a friendly and welcoming research group, with attention to employee wellbeing. The terms of employment are in accordance with the Dutch Collective Labour Agreement for Universities (CAO). The preferred starting date is between May 1st 2022 and September 1st 2022.