[agents] Two Postdoc Positions available (at King's College London and Warwick)

[Nathan Griffiths]

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Overview
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** JOB OPENINGS: 2 Research Fellows (3 years)
** Areas: Reputation & Trust, Provenance, Machine Learning
** Locations:
**    King's College London, UK (with Dr Simon Miles)
**    University of Warwick, UK (with Dr Nathan Griffiths)
** Closing date: 12 December 2014

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Job description
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Applications are invited for two three-year postdoctoral positions on
an EPSRC-funded project entitled ‘JASPR: Justified Assessments of
Service Provider Reputation’, which is a joint project of King's
College London and the University of Warwick.

You will have a strong background in agent-based systems, provenance,
machine learning and will be able to contribute to the design,
analysis, implementation and evaluation of algorithms and software
tools for reputation assessment from provenance records for
service-oriented systems. You should have excellent programming
skills, ideally in Java/Scala, and good written and verbal
communication skills enabling you to effectively communicate with the
project partners and contribute to writing scientific articles. You
should possess a PhD degree in Computer Science or a related
discipline, or be close to completing your PhD degree.

There are two posts:

Post 1 (King's College London): focusing on provenance, reputation, trust

Post 2 (University of Warwick): focusing on reputation, trust, machine learning

Salary level: £28,695 - £37,394 per annum (plus London weighting for KCL post)

Full details of the project and the role of each post can be found at:

Post 1: https://www.hirewire.co.uk/HE/1061247/MS_JobDetails.aspx?JobID=56304
Post 2: https://atsv7.wcn.co.uk/search_engine/jobs.cgi?owner=5062452&ownertype=fair&jcode=1446015&vt_template=1457&adminview=1

For more information please contact Dr Simon Miles
(simon.miles at kcl.ac.uk) or Dr Nathan Griffiths
(nathan.griffiths at warwick.ac.uk)

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How to apply
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Candidates are requested to submit their full Curriculum Vitae and
contact details of two referees using the KCL and/or Warwick
application system. Informal enquiries to simon.miles at kcl.ac.uk or
nathan.griffiths at warwick.ac.uk are welcome.

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Project overview
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Justified Assessments of Service Provider Reputation (JASPR) aims to
improve the way that services are discovered, selected and used by
providing rich, personalised reputation assessments of services with
the rationale behind those assessments. It is particularly targeted at
giving small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) better exposure to
large clients by reducing clients' reliance on extensive market
histories or opaque online reviews that do not account for
personalised needs. While large companies can rely on brand influence
to bring clients to their services, it is difficult for SMEs to gain
market access, especially newer businesses with little history for
clients to draw on. This can mean that an SME is overlooked even when
providing a service directly matching the client's needs. From the
customer side, the project will allow more intelligent service
procurement, based on rich reputation assessments reflecting the
actual performance of providers, with less bias from branding and
superficial reviews.

More generally, in any service-based system, an accurate assessment of
reputation is essential for selecting between alternative providers.
Existing methods typically assess reputation on a combination of
direct experiences by the client being provided with a service and
third party recommendations, with the reputation expressed as a
numerical score or probability estimate. They do not allow the
opportunity to interrogate an assessment to find out why a particular
assessment is made, and so whether it is appropriate to a new service
selection requirement, and they exclude from consideration a wealth of
information about the context of providers' previous actions that
could give useful information to a customer in selecting a service
provider. For example, there may be mitigating circumstances for past
failures, or a provider may have changed their organisational
affiliation. These limitations are of particular significance in
marketplaces involving both newer and more established service
providers. New providers are often disadvantaged in a marketplace
since a single negative review can disproportionately harm their
reputation, and customers are unable to accurately assess the risk
associated with new providers compared to those that are established.
To make richer reputation assessments that take into account the
context of past service provisions, this context must be modelled and
recorded, and can be described as the provenance of the provision.

JASPR will use provenance records as a source of information on which
a more nuanced reputation mechanism can be based. We will define the
supporting algorithms and software infrastructure to allow this rich
reputation information to be captured, analysed and presented to
clients.


-- 
Dr Nathan Griffiths
Associate Professor, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK
http://go.warwick.ac.uk/nathangriffiths