17 May Looking for a PhD!
We are looking for a PhD student for the FWO funded project DELICIOS. The research will be performed with the groups of Prof. Pieter Simoens (UG – IDlab), Prof. Jo Pierson (VUB – SMIT) and Prof. Tom Lenaerts (VUB/ULB – AI lab/MLG). This works builds on the expertise of these groups in collective intelligence, (evolutionary) game theory, human trust, behavioral intelligence and AI. Your work will consist of building agent-based models, performing a series of behavioral experiments, as defined in the research context below, report on the scientific insights gathered from these models and experiments.
To apply see : https://www.imec-int.com/nl/work-at-imec/job-opportunities/phd-position-in-behavioral-informatics-and-ai
Research context: In this age of ubiquitous digital interconnectivity, we may envisage that humans will increasingly delegate their social, economic or data-related transactions to an autonomous agent, for reasons of convenience or complexity. Although the scientific knowledge to create such systems appears to be available, this transformation does not appear to become commonplace soon, except maybe the use of basic digital assistants.
We aim to explore if this is due to the lack of knowledge about human trust and acceptance of artificial autonomous delegates that make decisions in their place or even how these delegates should be designed. We will study these questions using computational agent-based models that are validated in a series of behavioral experiments defined around the public goods game. We investigate when and how the autonomous agent may evolve from observer, over decision support to a delegate with full autonomy in decision-making. In later phases of the research, we will investigate networking effects between these agents and study the collective behavior of such agent-based systems.
The research is conducted in the scope of a multi-disciplinary project. You will collaborate with two other researchers. One other student will investigate how a VR/AR representation of the agent influences trust. The other student – from the domain of social sciences – will check all the technology-oriented research against socio-technology acceptance theories. The results of this fundamental research will allow us to explore important questions related to the intelligence and interface of the envisioned agents and lay the foundation for new types of online markets that bring autonomous agents into real-world applications.