[PlanetKR] PhD offer: Effects of collaboration and specialisation on agent knowledge evolution

[Jerome Euzenat]

[Apologies for multiple posting] 

We are looking for talented and motivated students to start a PhD on cultural knowledge evolution
Here is one open topic (others are on https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/3YdLC3QN90Sx4vVMcgorzg?domain=moex.inria.fr). Do not hesitate to contact me.

PhD topic: Effects of collaboration and specialisation on agent knowledge evolution
https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/8lugC4QO9DS68xGWcxcodn?domain=moex.inria.fr

By performing tasks, agents acquire knowledge that can be used in other contexts for other tasks. We aims at understanding how several agents performing, collaboratively or competitively, different tasks for achieving different goals, may acquire better knowledge.

Cultural knowledge evolution deals with the evolution of knowledge representation in a group of agents. For that purpose, cooperating agents adapt their knowledge to the situations they are exposed to and the feedback they receive from others. This framework has been considered in the context of evolving natural languages [Steels, 2012]; We have applied it to ontology alignment repair, i.e. the improvement of incorrect alignments [Euzenat, 2014; 2017]. We have shown that cultural repair is able to converge towards successful communication through improving the objective knowledge quality.

In most of the work so far, agents are designed for dealing with one single task. Hence, their knowledge is shaped for this particular task. However, pursuing several goals at once, and performing different tasks to that end, would benefit from developing non-specialised (multi-purpose) knowledge. It is expected that agents developing such knowledge would have more facility to address different tasks.

On the other side of the spectrum, we may consider societies of complementary and very specialised agents. This includes the competition of several agents able to perform the same specific task. Such societies are more specifically considered by economic approaches, in particular game theory.

As an example, one may consider agents pursuing different goals for subsisting: being fed and in good health. This involves various tasks such as growing food, producing medicine and providing care. In turns, this involves other tasks such as extracting matters, moving matter, manufacturing medicine, moving manufactured products such as food and medicine, training nurses, etc. To achieve their goals, all agents may be a gardener, a cook, a nurse, a nurse trainer and a transporter. Skills developed for transporting people, may be reused for transporting food and vice-versa, knowledge developed for training gardiners, may be reused for training pharmacists. However, in other societies agents may specialise into gardening, caring or teaching and the bests at each task may be selected in a competitive market.

This thesis proposal thus considers two different dimensions together: on the one hand, whether agents are expected to perform one or several tasks; on the other hand, whether they work collaboratively, independently or competitively.

We consider cultural knowledge evolution in such a context with the aim to understand the impact of such an organisation on the knowledge developed by each agent and by the society as a whole. Knowledge may be considered under the light of its contribution to reaching the agents' goals or for its own value, such as its correctness and completeness. Knowledge may also be measured at the level of the society. For instance, one may want to measure the degree at which the wealth is shared. In addition, we want to assess are the differential benefits of each approach: this may be short-term efficiency or long-term resilience.

These problems may be treated both theoretically or experimentally

This work is part of an ambitious program towards what we call cultural knowledge evolution partly funded by the MIAI Knowledge communication and evolution chair and may be carried out in collaboration with international partners.

* References:

[Euzenat, 2014] Jérôme Euzenat, First experiments in cultural alignment repair (extended version), in: Proc. 3rd ESWC workshop on Debugging ontologies and ontology mappings (WoDOOM), Hersounisos (GR), LNCS 8798:115-130, 2014 https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/Mp4JC5QPWESRl1OKfyTLn0?domain=ftp.inrialpes.fr
[Euzenat, 2017] Jérôme Euzenat, Communication-driven ontology alignment repair and expansion, in: Proc. 26th International joint conference on artificial intelligence (IJCAI), Melbourne (AU), pp185-191, 2017 https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/0cMYC6XQ07tMWJx9t50Lu8?domain=ftp.inrialpes.fr
[Steels, 2012] Luc Steels (ed.), Experiments in cultural language evolution, John Benjamins, Amsterdam (NL), 2012

* Links:

- MIAI Knowledge communication and evolution: https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/xi_sC71RA7HyRY96CqJlE1?domain=moex.inria.fr
- mOeX web site: https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/xqELC81V97HQkgxMSwNV8G?domain=moex.inria.fr
- Lazy lavender: https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/jQ5mC91W27HxOjPKc0a7oT?domain=lazylav.gforge.inria.fr

-- 
| Jérôme Euzenat           INRIA & Univ. Grenoble Alpes, LIG, Grenoble, France |
| Jerome : Euzenat # inria : fr                          https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/xqELC81V97HQkgxMSwNV8G?domain=moex.inria.fr |

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