The Scrutable Autonomous Systems (SAsSy) project aims to enable the scrutiny of autonomous systems by allowing agents to generate plans through argument and dialogue, while justifying the purpose of each step within the joint plan. Humans or agent can then critique these plans by suggesting and justifying alternative courses of actions as needed, thus driving the planning process. In this way, a scrutable autonomous system can allow for both the collaborative generation of a plan, and for its simultaneous verification.
To achieve its goals, the SAsSy project seeks a post-doctoral researcher who will investigate argumentation and dialogue based approaches to generate, represent and reason about plans, factoring in explicit norms and goals. Argumentation provides a natural way of explaining the rationale for decisions and their justifications, while dialogue will allow for their incremental generation and modification.
Since non-technical users can struggle to understand the formal arguments that underpin plans in such an approach, the project will also design and evaluate novel interfaces intended to present plans and their justifications in a coherent manner to such users. The project will therefore seek additional post-doctoral researchers with expertise in natural language generation and user modelling. The successful candidate will be expected to work closely with the other project members in order to achieve the overall project goals.
This post is funded by the EPSRC, and is offered for a period of 36 months.
For further details, please see http://bit.ly/KSQpQr
Informal enquiries can be made to Nir Oren, n.oren at abdn.ac.uk
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Dr. Nir Oren
Department of Computing Science
University of Aberdeen
AB24 3UE
n.oren@abdn.ac.uk
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