1-2 WASP-funded postdoc positions at the Department of Computing Science at Umeå University.
Project description and working tasks
In modern software systems and the organizations that run them, a substantial part of day-to-day decisions with critical impact on individual humans and society at large is either fully automated or heavily relies on automatically provided decision support. While machine learning approaches become increasingly prevalent in this context, the cores of the systems’ reasoning engines typically remain ‘symbolic’ (knowledge-based). These symbolic or neuro-symbolic software systems are of high practical complexity, which makes them difficult to reason about, for example when assessing which meta-level changes lead to the intended real-world impact. Working towards solving this problem, the theme of the broader project is ‘Automating Reasoning about Automated Reasoning’. From a fundamental research perspective, this relates to the automation of meta-reasoning pertaining to general-purpose reasoning methods. Here, the intended focus is on reasoning approaches that can revise their conclusions in face of new evidence/knowledge. The plan is to cover both nascent approaches that are considered promising facilitators of the fusion of subsymbolic, symbolic, and human intelligence, as well as industry-scale reasoning systems. Instances of the former class are different variants of formal argumentation, whereas in the latter case, the focus can lie on mainstream rule languages that are deployed in large-scale IT systems.
Within the broader realm of the theme ‘Automating Reasoning about Automated Reasoning’, research tasks can be selected based on the strengths of the successful candidate, in either the broad direction of principle-based meta-reasoning (formal focus) and applications of automated meta-reasoning to large-scale software systems (engineering focus).
Research is carried out in collaboration with other scientists at the Department of Computing Science focusing on knowledge-based AI, under the leadership of Vicenç Torra and Timotheus Kampik. Excellent international collaboration opportunities exist, backed-up by a strong track-record of joint work with globally leading research groups and large tech companies.