Postdoc position - Seeking Expression of Interest - KR & Agents - RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

[Sebastian Sardina]

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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 at 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.

Ströder, 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