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PhD position: @ MINES Saint-Etienne (France): Regulation in Hybrid Communities of People and Agents on the Web
The Web is pervasive, increasingly populated with interconnected data, services, people and things. To empower people through sophisticated social machines, the Web has to enlarge its scope to address hybrid communities in which intelligent agents (e.g., crawlers, bots, recommender systems) collaborate with people as peers to help them cope with the growing number of available resources. As the Web continues to grow, it will continue to unlock practical uses for increasingly autonomous, cooperative and long-lived agents. In this context, hypermedia will enable flexible autonomous interaction among agents, people, and their environment. To ensure social order and global coherent behaviour, it is of first importance to complement this powered engine for hypermedia-driven interaction with regulation mechanisms to enforce and constrain autonomous behaviour in desired directions.
Keywords: Multi-Agent Systems, Semantic Web Technology, Norms, Policies
This PhD position is integrated in the context of an international research project that aims to define a new class of autonomous systems designed for the Web. The project brings together internationally recognized researchers actively contributing to research on autonomous agents and MAS, the Web architecture, Semantic Web, and to the standardization of the Web. The project partners are: the University of St. Gallen (HSG), MINES Saint-Etienne, and INRIA.
The objective of this PhD project is to address the regulation of hybrid communities in the context of the Web, which is the most scalable, flexible, and human-centric software system ever deployed. The Web was specifically designed to be an Internet-scale and long-lived system in which components can be deployed and can evolve independently from one another at run time. Thus, the high degrees of openness, heterogeneity, long-livedness, and the immense scale of the Web pose unique challenges that have to be considered when designing regulation mechanisms for hybrid communities on the Web.
Regulation is a multi-faceted concept, which is studied in several domains. In the Web domain, regulation has generally been addressed by policies targeting the individual level -- and in multi-agent systems (MAS), by norms (agreed-upon policies targeting the social level).
Policies on the Web have been studied to a large extent. The developed approaches are mainly targeting representations that support static verification and automated reasoning. Such representations have different meanings in relation to security and privacy, access and control, adaptable and context-aware systems, for instance in order to control behaviour or to express legal knowledge (terms and conditions of licenses). In the multi-agent domain, regulation has been studied to a large extent in research on normative approaches, where regulative norms or prescriptions are generally used to specify who does what, in what context, and as subject to what deontic modality (e.g., obligation, prohibition, permission). Regulative norms affect the agent behaviour in an indirect manner so that agents can autonomously decide to conform or not to the prescriptions of the norms, for instance balancing internal motivation and desires versus the external consequences of violating a regulative norm. While the representations are certainly less rich than those proposed in the Web community, these works have laid out architectures and mechanisms for the monitoring and enforcement of the agents' behaviour.
This PhD position is integrated in the context of an international research project that aims to define a new class of autonomous systems designed for the Web. The project brings together internationally recognized researchers actively contributing to research on autonomous agents and MAS, the Web architecture, Semantic Web, and to the standardization of the Web. The project partners are: the University of St. Gallen (HSG), MINES Saint-Etienne, and INRIA.
The objective of this PhD project is to address the regulation of hybrid communities in the context of the Web, which is the most scalable, flexible, and human-centric software system ever deployed. The Web was specifically designed to be an Internet-scale and long-lived system in which components can be deployed and can evolve independently from one another at run time. Thus, the high degrees of openness, heterogeneity, long-livedness, and the immense scale of the Web pose unique challenges that have to be considered when designing regulation mechanisms for hybrid communities on the Web.
Regulation is a multi-faceted concept, which is studied in several domains. In the Web domain, regulation has generally been addressed by policies targeting the individual level -- and in multi-agent systems (MAS), by norms (agreed-upon policies targeting the social level).
Policies on the Web have been studied to a large extent. The developed approaches are mainly targeting representations that support static verification and automated reasoning. Such representations have different meanings in relation to security and privacy, access and control, adaptable and context-aware systems, for instance in order to control behaviour or to express legal knowledge (terms and conditions of licenses). In the multi-agent domain, regulation has been studied to a large extent in research on normative approaches, where regulative norms or prescriptions are generally used to specify who does what, in what context, and as subject to what deontic modality (e.g., obligation, prohibition, permission). Regulative norms affect the agent behaviour in an indirect manner so that agents can autonomously decide to conform or not to the prescriptions of the norms, for instance balancing internal motivation and desires versus the external consequences of violating a regulative norm. While the representations are certainly less rich than those proposed in the Web community, these works have laid out architectures and mechanisms for the monitoring and enforcement of the agents' behaviour.
The position will give you the opportunity to work toward a PhD in Computer Science.
The position will give you the opportunity to work toward a PhD in Computer Science.
A curriculum vitae together with a motivation letter, and MSc / BSc transcripts should be sent to Olivier Boissier (Olivier.Boissier@emse.fr) & Serena Villata (serena.villata@inria.fr).
A curriculum vitae together with a motivation letter, and MSc / BSc transcripts should be sent to Olivier Boissier (Olivier.Boissier@emse.fr) & Serena Villata (serena.villata@inria.fr).