Logic List Mailing Archive

Postdoctoral position in KR & Agents, Melbourne (Australia)

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KR & Agent Postdoc Position: RMIT University Melbourne Australia
Seeking Expressions of Interest
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We will be soon advertising a postdoctoral position between 2-3 years, 
starting early to mid 2012, working within the Intelligent Agents Group at 
RMIT University in Melbourne, and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory 
at University of New South Wales in Sydney. The project will also involve 
collaboration with staff from "La Sapienza" University in Rome, Italy. The 
specific position is as a postdoc on the ARC grant ``Optimisation of 
embedded virtual complex systems by re-using a library of available 
components''. This project involves developing principled representation 
and reasoning mechanisms for tackling the so-called behaviour composition 
problem in ways amenable for practical implementation.

In a nutshell, the behaviour composition problem involves automatically 
synthesising a controller-coordinator that can implement a given desired 
but non-existing target complex behaviour (e.g., a home entertainment 
system) by using a set of available existing behaviour modules (e.g., 
video cameras, TVs, lights, music and game devices, etc.). A behaviour 
here refers to the operational logic of a system and is general 
represented as a transition system. This composition synthesis problem is 
important in that it can be recast in a variety of forms within several 
sub-areas of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, including robot 
ecologies and intelligent spaces, agent programming and multi-agent 
system, web-service composition, automated planning, among others. In 
particular, this project aims at developing a framework for behaviour 
composition that will cater for: (a) unsolvable problem instances where no 
perfect controller exists; (b) difficult instances where sub-optimal 
solutions may suffice; and (c) relevant domain specific information that 
is not being considered by any approach to date.

We are looking for a person with an excellent record of working on 
practical knowledge representation and reasoning problems, producing high 
quality publications with good impact. We are looking for expertise in 
areas of artificial intelligence such as automated planning, optimisation, 
knowledge representation and reasoning, intelligent agents, verification, 
and synthesis. The person should be able to work well in a team, but 
should also be able to take a lead role in driving forward the research.

RMIT has a large computer science department with a well established and 
internationally recognised research group in the area of Intelligent 
Agents. Melbourne is a hub for a significant amount of research and 
development in Intelligent Agents and their applications and is the home 
of "Agents Victoria" a group of industry, government and university 
groups, involved in agent research and applications. UNSW is ranked among 
the top 100 for Computer Science in the Academic Ranking of World 
Universities. It is a partner in the ARC Centre of Excellence for 
Autonomous Systems (CAS) which is the second largest robotics research 
group in the world with a leading reputation for both fundamental research 
and the application of this to industry.

More information can be found in the following link:

http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/agents/www/positions/2012-DP110101668/

Please email expressions of interest to Sebastian Sardina 
<sebastian.sardina@rmit.edu.au>. Please put POSTDOC in the subject header.

Some URLs:
http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/agents
http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/
http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~aishare/

Some references:

Nitin Yadav and Sebastian Sardina. Decision theoretic behavior composition. In
Tumer, Yolum, Sonenberg, and Stone, editors, Proceedings of Autonomous Agents
and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS), pages 575-582, Taipei, Taiwan, May 2011. ACM
Press.

Strder, T., Pagnucco, M. Realising Deterministic Behavior from Multiple
Non-Deterministic Behaviors, In Proceedings of the Twentyfirst International
Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'09), pp. 936 -- 941,
Pasedena, USA, July 2009.

Sebastian Sardina, Fabio Patrizi, and Giuseppe De Giacomo. Behavior composition
in the presence of failure. In Gerhard Brewka and Jerome Lang, editors,
Proceedings of Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), pages
640-650, Sydney, Australia, September 2008. AAAI Press