[agents] RA position in automated planning at King's College London

[Black, Elizabeth]

Research Associate, 12 month fixed term contract
Department of Informatics, King's College London
https://www.hirewire.co.uk/HE/1061247/MS_JobDetails.aspx?JobID=58699

We are looking for a post-doctoral researcher with a background in automated planning to join the Planning an Argument project.

Formal argument dialogues provide a principled way of structuring rational argument based interactions where the participants, e.g., assert arguments and claims, and question and challenge one another's assertions, in order to achieve some dialogue goal (e.g., to persuade the other to accept a particular point of view). This project addresses the problem of how a machine can determine the particular speech acts to make during an argument dialogue (which may be with another machine or a human participant) in order to try to achieve its dialogue goal, i.e., how it can generate an argument dialogue strategy.

The problem of determining an effective argument dialogue strategy reduces to selecting a sequence of communicative actions to make (the speech acts), the effects of which will achieve the desired outcome; this is exactly the problem studied by the automated planning community. This project will formalise this relationship, allowing us to leverage results from automated planning to generate argument dialogue strategies.

The post-holder will collaborate with Dr Elizabeth Black, the Principal Investigator, to model argument dialogue strategy generation as a planning problem, so that existing planning algorithms can be applied to generate argument dialogue strategies. Dialogue strategy generation problems are particularly challenging for automated planning, involving uncertainty (one cannot normally know the interlocutor's private state) and non-determinism (one cannot determine the speech acts your interlocutor will make), meaning careful consideration will need to be given to modelling them in a way that planners can efficiently solve them.

Essential elements of person specification:
- PhD awarded or nearing completion in Computer Science, in the field of automated planning.
- Ability to initiate, develop and deliver high quality research and to publish in peer reviewed conferences and journals.
- Ability to write research reports and papers in styles accessible to academic audiences.
- Good programming skills.
- Effective communication (oral and written) skills.
- Experience of presenting research to an academic audience.
- Ability to work independently and as part of a team on research programmes.

The post-holder will be based in the Department of Informatics at the Strand campus of King's, located in the centre of London. In the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, Informatics at King's was rated as having 92% of its research outputs as world leading or internationally excellent. The 2014 REF results placed the Department in the Top 10 of Computer Science and Informatics departments in the UK, when measured by the Power Ranking.

Interviews will be held in April 2015. The post-holder must be in place no earlier than 1 May 2015 and no later than 31 July 2015.

Closing date: 30 March 2015

For further information, including how to apply, please see https://www.hirewire.co.uk/HE/1061247/MS_JobDetails.aspx?JobID=58699

If you have questions about this role, please contact: Dr Elizabeth Black, Email: elizabeth.black at kcl.ac.uk<mailto:elizabeth.black at kcl.ac.uk>.


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Dr Elizabeth Black
Lecturer | Agents and Intelligent Systems Group
Faculty of Natural & Mathematical Sciences Equality & Diversity Champion
Chair of Department of Informatics Information Strategy Group
Department of Informatics | Faculty of Natural & Mathematical Sciences
King's College London | Strand Building S6.21 | Strand | London | WC2R 2LS
Tel: 020 7848 2694 | Email: elizabeth.black at kcl.ac.uk<mailto:elizabeth.black at kcl.ac.uk>
Website: http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/lizblack

Natural & Mathematical Sciences Women in Science Initiative:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/nms/WomeninScience/index.aspx

The Science of Kings: http://www.scienceofkings.org/

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