PhD Positions in the ERC AdG Project WhiteMech – Sapienza Università di Roma

Posted onAuthorClaudia Cauli

The Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering of Sapienza Università di Roma (Italy) is looking for enthusiastic PhD students interested in solving realistic-size and practical synthesis, planning, and acting problems in the hot topics of resilient self-programming in several contexts (Cybersecurity, Smart Manufacturing, or Digital Healthcare and Digital Finance).

Students can apply to two programs, deadlines are approaching:

Find the original ad and more details below:

ERC AdG WhiteMech PhD positions in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering
Sapienza University of Rome – Italy

ERC AdG WhiteMech <https://whitemech.github.io> related PhD positions in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering of Sapienza Università di Roma within challenging projects to develop new algorithms for the automatic synthesis of programs, strategies, policies, plans from high level specifications for resilience, and making these operate in industrial (e.g. manufacturing), (e.g. hospital), and Digital Finance relevant environments. 

Resilience in Computer Science (CS) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the ability to recover gracefully from disruption of the expected circumstances. Resilience has a primary role in distributed systems, but other areas of CS and AI squarely focused on efficiency,considering resiliency only as an afterthought. This is especially true of the areas of CS and AI at the basis of self-programming, such as Agent Program Synthesis, Planning, Reasoning about Actions and Sequential Decision Making, and Formal Methods (FM), which all witnessed a very rapid development in the last years.

Are you interested in developing the foundations of resilience in self-programming, develop novel algorithms, extending state-of-the-art AI techniques, and prepared to take-on real-life problems  through an implementation of the techniques in tools and apply them in important application contexts, such as Cybersecurity (Cyber In-telligence and Information Security), Smart Manufacturing (Industry 4.0), or Digital Healthcare (Hospital of theFuture) or Digital Finance (with collaboration with JPMorgan)?

Join us in a team that considers automated program synthesis from high-level temporal logical specifications and automated planning the mean to achieve autonomous agent self-programming with the ability to o recover gracefully from disruption of the expected circumstances

The main tasks for the PhD student are to work on algorithms and artificial intelligence techniques from the fields of temporal logic synthesis, planning, constraint programming, mathematical optimization, evolutionary algorithms and/or reinforcement learning i) to solve such synthesis problems to achieve resilience; ii) to deepen our understanding of these techniques; iii) and to show how they can be successfully combined to solve relevant problems in the respective context. Moreover, the PhD student will be allowed to experiment the developed techniques and algorithms in realistic-size facilities (e.g. Robotic Labs at the University, and industrial facilities joint with the University of Trento) equipped with state-of-the-art robotic and automation platforms, or in realistic environments in collaboration with a big financial player (JPMorgan).

The calls are now open within National PhD in AI, and within PhD in Engineering of Computer Science), and granted from the Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering of Sapienza Università di Roma with contribution of the WhiteMech ERC Advanced Grant in AI on WhiteBox Self-Programming Mechanisms. The research will be carried out under the joint supervision of Prof. Giuseppe De Giacomo (from University of Sapienza Roma) and Prof. Marco Roveri (from University of Trento).

Interested candidates shall contact 

     Prof. Giuseppe De Giacomo degiacomo@diag.uniroma1.it 

     Prof. Marco Roveri marco.roveri@unitn.it
to ask for additional information and to arrange for a preliminary interview.

Requirements

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Applications for the National PHD in Artificial Intelligence and for the Phd in Engineering in Computer Science are accepted from applicants who hold:

  • an Italian “Laurea magistrale” instituted in conformity with Italian Ministerial Decree 270/2004, or
  • a university degree of the previous regulations (Italian “Laurea specialistica ” or “Diploma di Laurea”), or
  • an equivalent degree obtained abroad (Master’s degree) and recognized as equivalent to the Italian “Laurea magistrale” by the Admissions Committee for the sole purposes of admission to the Doctoral programme, also within the framework of mobility and cooperation inter-university agreements.

Applications are also accepted from students who expect to complete their degree before the starting of the PhD grant (see the complete list of requirements in the application web page below).

Application

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We recommend interested students to apply to both programs (National PHD in Artificial Intelligence and for the Phd in Engineering in Computer Science) following the instructions available at the application link below:

Deadline for the applications: