Connectionists: [jobs] Fully funded Ph.D. position at Ecole Polytechnique (LIX) and IP Paris

[Nguyen, Sao Mai]

We are looking for a candidate for a fully funded Ph.D. position to work at
the intersection of
Robotics and Formal Methods.

Continuously Learning Complex Tasks via Symbolic Analysis (CoLeSlAw)
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Fully autonomous robots have the potential to impact real-life
applications, like assisting elderly people. Autonomous robots must
deal with uncertain and continuously changing environments, where it
is not possible to program the robot tasks. Instead, the robot must
continuously learn new tasks. The robot should further learn how to
perform more complex tasks combining simpler ones (i.e., a task
hierarchy). This problem is called lifelong learning of hierarchical
tasks.

The existing learning algorithms for hierarchical tasks are limited in
that: a) they require the robot to execute a large number of real
actions to sample the continuous state space of observations, hence
requiring a lot of time; b) they cannot deal with subspaces without
continuous interpolation, as it is the case for a hierarchy of tasks.

The goal of the Ph.D. project is to explore the use of set-based
and symbolic reasoning for the continuous space to tackle the above
challenges (e.g., reducing the number of samples required to learn a
hierarchy of tasks and allow for more effective planning of the robot
tasks, further handling discontinuities in the task hierarchies).

The main outcome of the project will be an algorithmic framework to
effectively explore task hierarchies and new reachability algorithms
for data-oriented models, such as neural networks.


Candidate
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The ideal candidate will have a Master degree in Computer science and
a strong background in at least one topic among learning algorithms,
robotics, planning, and formal methods (e.g., abstract interpretation, model
checking).


Deadline
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The formal deadline to apply is May 14th 2020.


Work environment
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The Ph.D. will be carried out in the Laboratoire d’informatique de
École Polytechnique (LIX), École Polytechnique, and  in the Computer
Science and Systems Engineering Laboratory (U2IS http://u2is.ensta-paris.fr),
ENSTA Paris, ENSTA
Paris, under the supervision of Sergio Mover and Sylvie Putot from LIX,
and Sao Mai Nguyen and Alexandre Chaputot from U2IS.


Doctoral School
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
École Polytechnique and ENSTA Paris are part of the Institut
Polytechnique de Paris (IPP) and the Ph.D. will be at in the IP Paris
doctoral school
(
https://www.ip-paris.fr/en/home-en/education/phd-programs/ip-paris-doctoral-school/
).


Contacts and application
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To apply, please send a CV, a motivation letter and a transcript.
For more information and to get the information to apply contact
Sergio Mover and Sao Mai Nguyen.


Sergio Mover, Cosynus Team, LIX and Ecole Polytechnique, sergio.mover <at>
polytechnique.edu

and

Nguyen Sao Mai
nguyensmai at gmail.com
Researcher in Cognitive Developmental Robotics
http://nguyensmai.free.fr | Youtube <http://www.youtube.com/user/nguyensmai>
| Twitter <https://twitter.com/nguyensmai> | ResearchGate
<https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sao_Mai_Nguyen> | Hal
<https://hal.inria.fr/search/index/?q=%2A&authIdHal_s=sao-mai-nguyen&sort=producedDate_tdate+desc>
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