PhD student in AI & Logic

We are looking for a PhD candidate in Artificial Intelligence and Logic at Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT), Toulouse, France, with starting date on 1st January 2019. The deadline for applications is 5 November 2018.

DESCRIPTION

The PhD candidate will work in the context of the recently funded ANR project CoPains 'Cognitive Planning in Persuasive Multimodal Communication':

The goal of the CoPains project is to build artificial agents that are capable of inducing human users to adopt healthy behaviors and, if necessary, by persuading them to change their habits in their interest. More precisely, the application domain of CoPains is persuasive technology for healthcare and assistance in which an embodied conversational agent (ECA) interacts with a person in a multimodal way in order to support her activity and to take care of her well-being. In order to interact with the person in an efficient way, the agent will be endowed with a sophisticated model of human cognition which will make it capable of being persuasive and of planning a strategy aimed at influencing the user's behavior. In order to achieve this objective, CoPains is expected to exploit theoretical and empirical approaches by combining, in a rather innovative way, corpus-based analysis with formal methods from different areas of artificial intelligence (AI). This includes logic, planning, sentiment analysis, and data-mining.

The successful candidate will be enrolled as a PhD student at the Université Toulouse III Paul Sabatier (http://www.univ-tlse3.fr) and will become member of the LILaC research group at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (https://www.irit.fr). The main focus of the research group is the study of models of agents and their interaction with the aid of formal methods including logic and game theory.

The PhD is fully funded during the 3 years 2019-2021 as part of the ANR project CoPains, including travel expenses for attending scientific conferences and project meetings. The PhD candidate is expected to write a PhD thesis by the end of the third year, attend regular research seminars and meetings of the research group, publish and present her or his work regularly at international conferences and workshops.

REQUIREMENTS

Applicants should hold a Master degree in Computer Science or a close discipline. Further requirements are an excellent track record, a strong drive towards fundamental research and academic work, and full proficiency in English.

Previous knowledge of topics related to logic and artificial intelligence is welcome.

Knowledge of French language is not required. Successful applicants will have the opportunity to learn French during their stay.

PROPONENT AND CONTACT PERSON

Dr. Emiliano Lorini Université Paul Sabatier IRIT, LILaC team 118 route de Narbonne 31062 Toulouse, France Tel: (+33)0561556447 email: Emiliano.Lorini at irit.fr website: https://www.irit.fr/~Emiliano.Lorini/

APPLICATION PROCEDURE

Applications should be sent to Emiliano.Lorini at irit.fr before 5 November 2018. They should consist of a single PDF document including a detailed CV of the candidate, a motivation letter including a description of the candidate's research interests, 2 recommendation letters, a copy of the official transcript of grades at Master level, and a link to a Master thesis. Prospective candidates are encouraged to make contact with the contact person before submitting their applications.