PhD Scholarship in Declarative Problem Solving

The AI Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussels invites applications for a PhD scholarship at the Knowledge Representation and reasoning research group. Currently, there is one open position in the the FRESCO project, which aims to develop explanation mechanisms for combiantorial search or opitimization problems (for instance in the context of sat solving, constraint solving, pseudo-boolean solving, ...). The goal of this project is to come up with a framework that allows such solvers not just to find good solutions quickly, but also to explain to their users why this is a good solution, why it is the only solution, or why no solutions exist. Some preliminary work in this direction can be found in this paper and is summarized in this presentation. A particular long-term interest is the question how these explanations can be used to improve interactive configuration tools.