PhD student position on Knowledge Representation & Reasoning for Personal Agents, Enschede (The Netherlands)

Digital information technology is increasingly interwoven with our society and individuals' daily lives. With these digital technologies tracking and influencing our everyday behavior, they 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. This is challenging because 1) user models need to be understandable to and modifiable by the user, 2) conflicts may occur in the user's motivations, and 3) the user's state and motivations may change over time and in different contexts. We offer a fully funded 4-year PhD position to investigate how KRR & NMR 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.

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 October 1st 2022 or earlier.