Postdoctoral position on planning with others' beliefs and goals, Toulouse (France)

Coming up with plans to achieve their goals---and more generally deciding and learning how to act---are fundamental problems for intelligent agents. The traditional focus of AI planning is the generation of plans for an individual agent under the hypothesis that no other agent intervenes and that the planning agent has perfect knowledge of the environment and action pre- and postconditions. More expressive forms of planning should include things such as reasoning about other agents' beliefs, goals, intentions and actions ('theory of mind'); learning from past experiences; monitoring the actual outcome of actions and learning possibly unexpected outcomes and dealing with such new outcomes. Formal tools such as logics of knowledge and belief, logics of goals, intentions and actions, game theory, and learning can be expected to be building blocks of such formalisms.

We are looking for a candidate with a background in knowledge representation and/or machine learning who is interested in their integration in the context of planning. Applicants should propose a short research project related to the above themes, possibly relating it to previous work of ours where we have contributed to epistemic planning and to planning inspired from Bratman's theory of intention. The duration of the contract is 18 months (possibly with an extension). Gross salary is between 2.663E (about 2.131E net) and 3.783E (about 3.027E net), depending on the experience of the candidate. Starting date is September 1, 2022.