[agents] PhD opportunity “Strategy and Explainability for Knowledge Bases” at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

[Troquard Nicolas]

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PhD opportunity on “Strategy and Explainability for Knowledge Bases” at the Faculty of Engineering of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in Italy

Application Deadline: June 15
Link to Application:  https://www.unibz.it/en/faculties/engineering/phd-computer-science
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The Faculty of Engineering at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (unibz) offers a number of three-year grants for its PhD programme in Computer Science. 

The KRDB Research Centre for Knowledge and Data is looking specifically for candidates suitable for a PhD project titled: 
“Strategy and Explainability for Knowledge Bases”.

Description: 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. It 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.

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.

Weighted logic focuses on the idea that different pieces of information have different values, or weights, reflecting a very natural idea from common sense reasoning. Axiom weakening allows for a fine-grained repair of inconsistent knowledge bases. Its main advantage is that it repairs them by making axioms less restrictive rather than by deleting them.

Typical research questions are:
- Strategic reasoning: How can the techniques from multiagent systems and game theory be applied to problems of collaborative ontology engineering and concept combination? E.g., how can different agents agree on the weight of a particular piece of information?
- Explainability: How can we best combine the ideas of weighted logic, where different pieces of information have different weights, and refinement, where we specialize or generalize our information? How can we explain and justify the weakening of information?

Required skills: In general, applicants for this project are expected to have some good acquaintance with classical logic and its syntax and semantics. More advanced knowledge of proof methods, meta-theory, and non-classical logic will be a plus. The ideal candidate will already have some background in agents or game theory as well as KR languages such as description logics. Programming skills: experience with programming would be valuable, particularly for the purpose of carrying out evaluation studies and improving research prototypes.

Each grant amounts to 51,000 EUR (i.e., 17,000 EUR per year, net after taxes); for research visits abroad the grant increases by 50%. Additional substantial extra funding (including a personal budget of 2,500 EUR per year) is available for participation to international conferences, schools, workshops, and research visits. The language of the PhD programme is English.

Applications: The deadline for applications will be the 15th of June 2023.
(Applicants must have completed their Master’s degree at the time of enrolment by the 31st of October.)


For more information, the call, and applications look at: https://www.unibz.it/en/faculties/engineering/phd-computer-science

About Bolzano and unibz: The university is located in one of the most fascinating European regions, the tri-lingual South Tyrol. This young university has already established itself as an important research institution, both in Italy and abroad, and is accordingly highly evaluated in several international rankings. The KRDB Research Centre for Knowledge and Data at the Faculty of Engineering is widely recognised as one of the internationally leading groups in Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Representation research, with a synergy between foundational and application-oriented research. The city of Bozen-Bolzano, the capital of South Tyrol, has exceptional standards of living, and is a beautiful Italian city of mixed Austrian-Italian cultural heritage, and perfectly located in the Dolomites mountains, a UNESCO world heritage site.

Contact the supervisors:
Oliver Kutz, oliver.kutz at unibz.it
Nicolas Troquard, nicolas.troquard at unibz.it

http://www.inf.unibz.it/~okutz/
https://www.inf.unibz.it/~ntroquard/

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