[agents] Postdoc position at TU Delft on Value-Sensitive Collaborative Water Management

[Virginia Dignum - TBM]

Dear colleagues

We have a vacancy for a Postdoc on the Values4Water project (https://values4water.tbm.tudelft.nl/) at the faculty Technology Policy and Management of the Delft University of Technology.

This project is funded by the Responsible Innovation program of NWO and focuses on methods and tools for value-sensitive collaborative water management. The project is led by Dr. Virginia Dignum (m.v.dignum at tudelft.nl).



Water governance issues brings together various stakeholders like civilians, farmers, water supply companies, and industry, each with their own interests. In the recent years there has been an increase in identifying and understanding these interests and the conflicts that they can cause when decisions need to be taken and policy needs to be created.

Even though the different interests of stakeholders can appear in conflict at a first glance, the underlying ethical values on which they are based are often shared. People tend to agree on the importance of values. In many cases it is more constructive to make decisions based on the values of the stakeholders rather than solely on their interests.

In the Values4Water project we aim to support decision-making processes in the water governance (in various circumstances, ranging, e.g., from flood protection to sufficient fresh water supplies) by making the values explicit.



This postdoc position targets the development of a computational framework for collaborative decision-making, based on multi-agent organisation models, normative systems and argumentation models.  Candidates must hold a PhD on one of these topics. Experience in software development, user experiments and knowledge of the Dutch language are a pre.



This full-time (1 FTE) position is for 12 months, with starting date as soon as possible, preferably by 1st October 2016. We will also consider applications for 0.8FTE, in which case the contract can be extended to 15 months.



Applications must be send by email to Dr. Virginia Dignum (m.v.dignum at tudelft.nl<mailto:m.v.dignum at tudelft.nl>) and include a motivation letter (max. 1 A4), an up to date cv, and provide the contact details of two independent references.



Deadline for applications is 31 August 2016.