4y PhD/Postdoc in Formal Methods applied to guide Autonomous Agents based on Reinforcement Learning, Vienna (Austria)

The Trustworthy Cyber-Physical Systems Group at TU Wien is seeking a candidate for a PhD research position (four years, 30hours/week) or a postdoctoral research position (two years, 40hours/week), starting as soon as possible. The successful applicant will carry out his/her postdoc/PhD in the research area of formal methods applied to guide autonomous agents based on reinforcement learning. The position is in the context of the research project TAIGER: Training and Guiding AI Agents with Ethical Rules, aiming at designing autonomous agents sensitive to (ethical, legal and social) norms.

The PhD student will be affiliated with the TAIGER project, a new PhD program in Trustworthy Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems. TAIGER will introduce effective frameworks for equipping RL-based agents with the ability to comply with norms in possible interplay with their goals. Grounded in formal reasoning, the frameworks will be modular and facilitate transparent justification of judgments. Moreover, they will cope with potential contradictions in normative requirements and handle situations in which no compliance is possible, without deviating too much from the optimal behavior the agent has learned.