[PlanetKR] PhD position on belief base merging @ CRIL (France)

[Sébastien Konieczny]

** Topic

Belief Merging operators aim at defining a coherent belie base that best represents an input profile of belief bases that, most of the time, provide some mutually inconsistent pieces of information.

Usual belief merging operators assume that all the bases from the profile have the same importante/reliability/priority. But there are a lot of applications where it is not the case. So it is important to define operators that allow to take into account in a rational way these differences of importante/reliability/priority.

The aim of this PhD thesis is to study prioritized merging operators, that is to say operators that allow to define a belief base that best represents the profile of belief bases provided as input, and that take into account in a principled way the differences of priority between these bases.

It is easy to figure out the definition of some concrete merging operators, in particular for majority merging ones, but for other classes of operators, such as arbitration operators, it is far less obvious.

The aim of this PhD will be, after a bibliographic study of belief merging and related topics, such as voting theory, to define and study these prioritized operators, and in particular to find a logical characterization of these operators in terms of rationality postulates and of a representation theorem.

** Work Context

This PhD thesis will be part of the AI Chair BE4musIA (BElief change FOR better MUlti-Source Information Analysis - https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/unqwCJyBPjFyLQxztVhdGN?domain=cril.univ-artois.fr), that will begin this year at CRIL. The BE4musIA project aims at providing tools for information analysis when the pieces of information come from several sources of initially unknown reliability. From these pieces of information, it is then important to be able at any time to i) be able to build a coherent point of view of the situation ii) evaluate the reliability of each source. The aim of this project is to study these two tasks and to perform them conjointly, in order to obtain the most precise evaluation.

CRIL (Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Lens) - https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/7af6CK1D6kH9xrLwtvh7nI?domain=cril.fr - is a research laboratory that is dedicated to artificial intelligence, and more particularly to Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and to Algorithms for inference, SAT and constraints. CRIL is one of the few French partners of the H2020 project called TAILOR, set up by the confederation of laboratories for AI research in Europe (CLAIRE). CRIL is the First French lab in terms of number of papers accepted at IJCAI since 2011.

** Salary

The salary is the standard one for CNRS PhD contracts (around 2 135 € gross monthly)

** To apply

Applicants have to send a mail to  patricia.everaere-caillier at univ-lille.fr and konieczny at cril.fr, and to fill the application form on https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/cW1SCL7EPlFXMYLOIPhyM9?domain=bit.ly **before June 19th**
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://discuss.it.uts.edu.au/pipermail/planetkr/attachments/20200529/692eb439/attachment.html