[PlanetKR] Postdoct position in hybrid AI on cognitive planning with the help of a spiking neural network

[Andreas HERZIG]

* Job Description
Constructing plans to achieve their goals---and more generally deciding 
and learning how to act---are fundamental problems for intelligent 
agents. The focus of cognitive planning is the generation of plans for 
an individual agent by taking into account other aspects such as 
reasoning about the beliefs, goals, intentions and actions of other 
agents ('theory of mind'); learning from past experiences; monitoring 
the outcome of actions and learning and managing possibly unintended 
outcomes. Tools such as logics of knowledge and belief, logics of goals, 
intentions and actions, game theory and learning should play the role of 
building blocks of such formalisms. Furthermore, it is assumed that part 
of the knowledge useful for planning is extracted from a neural network 
based on spikes which remains to be defined.
 > The postdoc position is within the ALoRS project (Action, Logical 
Reasoning and Spiking networks, https://www.irit.fr/ALoRS/) for which 
IRIT is leader, and is part of workpackage WP2 "Cognitive architectures 
and NNs", possibly in connection with WP1 "Study and implementation of 
an SNN". ALoRS (project  ANR-21-CE23-0018-01) is a project funded by ANR 
(the French Research National Agency).
The duration of the contract is 24 months. Gross salary is between 2600 
and 3600 Euro, depending on the experience of the candidate. Starting 
date is in October or November, 2022.

* Context
The Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT) is one of 
the biggest computer science labs in France. Its AI Department has a 
long-standing tradition of research in knowledge representation and 
reasoning. IRIT participates in the ANITI project on hybrid AI.

* Profile and Application
We are looking for a candidate with a background in knowledge 
representation and/or machine learning who is interested in their 
integration in the context of planning et of spiking neural networks. 
Applicants should propose a brief research project, possibly relating it 
to our previous work in which we have contributed to cognitive planning 
in an explicit belief language.

Candidates should send the following to Dominique.Longin at irit.fr and 
Andreas.Herzig at irit.fr before September 21:
• CV;
• Up to 2 reference letters;
• A short proposal of research activities (max 1 page).