Postdoc position "Social Evaluation of Concepts", Bozen-Bolzano (Italy)

Project: SOCIAL EVALUATION OF CONCEPTS

http://www.danieleporello.net/seco.html

Keywords: Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Computational Social Choice, Ontologies.

Research Context: The problem of integrating heterogeneous views into a collective view has been extensively studied in Welfare Economics and in particular in Social Choice Theory (SCT). In recent years, SCT provided a significant amount of information about the foundational, mathematical, and also computational aspects of preference representation and aggregation. The idea of this project is to extensively apply the rich theory of preference representation and preference aggregation provided by SCT to number of crucial problems in concept and ontology evaluation. To this end, we shall approach the problem of how to elicit and formally represent users’ preferences over definitions of concepts and over the pieces of information provided by the ontology. The project is highly interdisciplinary as it comprises disciplines such as Artificial Intelligence, for the techniques required for a formally precise and computationally aware representation of concepts, Economics and Social Choice Theory, for the theory of preference representation and preference aggregation, Philosophy, for the foundational aspects of the modelling of preferences over concepts, and Cognitive Sciences, for the assessment of the adequacy of the proposed approach to cognitive users.

The candidate must hold a PhD in Computer Science or in a relevant field. Ideally, the candidate should be familiar with logic and knowledge representation, as well as with computational social choice.

Duration: 12 + 12 months.

Hosting team: KRDB Research Center for Knowledge and Data. https://www.inf.unibz.it/krdb/

Location: Free-University of Bozen-Bolzano.

Information on how to apply: https://www.unibz.it/en/home/position-calls/positions-for-academic-staff/3374-computer-science-dr-porello?group=18