Agents, Interactions & Complexity

Location:  Highfield Campus
Salary:   £31,406 to £32,344 per annum
Full Time Fixed Term for 12 months
Closing Date:  Wednesday 25 May 2022
Interview Date:   To be confirmed
Reference:  1810422FP

You will work on an exciting new project on citizen-centric AI systems. This project is funded via a prestigious £1.4M UKRI Turing AI Acceleration Fellowship that supports world-leading AI research.

The vision of this project is to develop AI systems with people at their heart. These citizen-centric AI systems learn the preferences of individual users to provide personalised services and advice in important application areas such as smart transportation, energy and disaster response. To ensure trustworthiness, these systems safeguard privacy by learning and making decisions locally, for example on a user's smart device.

You will work specifically on designing algorithms and incentive mechanisms for ridesharing applications. In this work, you will need to consider how to elicit and incorporate the preferences of ridesharing users, and how to incentivise them to participate in such a system. This will entail the use of game-theoretic techniques to design appropriate incentives, and, as such, you will need relevant expertise in mechanism design and/or social choice. You will also need some experience of working in ridesharing, or related transportation settings.

The project has the strong support of a unique consortium of industrial stakeholders, including companies such as IBM Research, Siemens Mobility, EA Technology, Dstl, UTU Technologies and Thales. These will interact with you regularly to ensure your work will help address real societal challenges. Such interactions will include regular meetings, workshops, as well as work on joint papers and potentially secondments.

To be successful you will have (or within 6 months of completion) a PhD (or professional qualifications and experience) in computer science or artificial intelligence. You have the ability to publish and present your work at top international venues, and you are passionate about working with stakeholders and end users to generate real impact from your research.

Ideally, your PhD is in an area related to mechanism design and/or social choice. 

Applications will be considered from candidates who are working towards or nearing completion of a relevant PhD qualification. The title of Research Fellow will be applied upon completion of PhD.  Prior to the qualification being awarded the title of Senior Research Assistant will be given.

This role will be offered on a full time, fixed term basis for 12 months.

About Us

You will join the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group within the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at Southampton. We are one of the world's leading groups in multi-agent systems research, and you will benefit from our significant research networks. For example, we lead the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub, we are a member of the Alan Turing Institute, and we run the MINDS CDT. These centres and networks will provide you with a valuable opportunity to work with researchers and other stakeholders from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines.

We highly value diversity in our teams, and we particularly encourage women, Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME), LGBT+ and disabled applicants to apply for this position. ECS is committed to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, and we hold an Athena SWAN Bronze Award. We give full consideration to applicants who wish to work flexibly and those who have taken a career break. The University has a generous maternity policy (subject to qualifying criteria) and onsite childcare facilities.

For informal enquiries about this position, please contact Dr Sebastian Stein (ss2@ecs.soton.ac.uk).

Application Procedure 

You should submit your completed online application form at https://jobs.soton.ac.uk. The application deadline will be midnight on the closing date stated above. If you need any assistance, please call Hannah Farrance (HR Recruitment Team) on 02380 592750 or email recruitment@soton.ac.uk  Please quote reference 1814022FP on all correspondence.