PhD Studentship: Human-Agent Collectives

Agents, Interactions & Complexity

Location: Highfield Campus

Closing Date:  Monday 01 May 2017

Reference: 846817F7

Project title: Fully Funded PhD Studentship in Human-Agent Collectives  

Supervisor: Dr Sebastian Stein

Co-supervisor: Prof Timothy Norman, Prof Nick Jennings

 Project description

 We welcome applications for afully funded PhD studentship in human-agent collectives within the Agents, Interaction and Complexity group at the University of Southampton.

 The successful candidate will join the U.S./UK-funded Distributed Analytics and Information Science International Technology Alliance (DAIS ITA): https://dais-ita.org. This $100M research programme is developing the fundamental science underpinning future information systems, where intelligent software agents and humans will work closely together to efficiently collect, process and disseminate information across complex and dynamic networks.

 The student will work closely with a team of academic staff, postdoctoral researchers and four PhD students on one of the two following topic areas:

 Incentives and influence in social networks:

Today’s vast online social networks connect people across geographical and cultural boundaries. This offers a tremendous opportunity for mobilising crowds to help during humanitarian crises or to support machine intelligence through human computation and crowdsourcing.

The student working on this topic area will develop new models that explain the spread of messages across online social networks (e.g., by considering trust relationships and social norms) and they will propose new intelligent algorithms for proactively influencing this (e.g., by offering effective incentive schemes or by providing the right information to key network nodes).

 Intelligent and robust service provisioning

We are increasingly surrounded by smart and interconnected systems, from low-powered Internet of Things (IoT) devices to powerful cloud servers that can be provisioned on demand via the Internet. Composing the vast amounts of data and computational services available through these systems enables new, highly-responsive information systems, including Smart Cities or multi-national coalitions of first responders during a natural disaster. However, these systems need to be robust to failures and cyber attacks, limited connectivity and high contention.

To address this, the student working on this topic will investigate new intelligent service provisioning algorithms and mechanisms that dynamically adapt to uncertainty and the presence of self-interested agents, while addressing relevant cybersecurity challenges.

 As part of this PhD, the student will advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence (and human-agent collectives in particular) and will publish at internationally leading conferences and journals. The supervisory team for the project is Dr Sebastian Stein, Professor Timothy Norman and Professor Nick Jennings (based at Imperial College London). This project is a unique opportunity to collaborate with a wide range of academic, industrial and governmental institutions across the alliance. The student will be expected to attend and be active contributors at regular project meetings that are held in both the UK and the U.S. There will be opportunities to apply for internships with both industry and government partners.

  Please contact Dr Sebastian Stein (ss2@ecs.soton.ac.uk)or Prof Timothy Norman (t.j.norman@soton.ac.uk) for further details.

 Key facts

 Entry requirements: first-class degree or equivalent in computer science or a related discipline.

 Closing date: applications should be received no later than 1 May 2017. Earlier applications are encouraged. Later applications may be considered depending on the funds remaining.

 Duration: three years (full-time)

 Funding: full tuition fees, for UK/EU students, and a tax-free stipend of £14,553 per year

 Assessment: Nine month and 18 month reports, viva voce and thesis examination

 Start date: typically September, but earlier start is possible

 Applying: www.southampton.ac.uk/postgraduate/pgstudy/howdoiapplypg.html