Connectionists: [jobs] PhD Fellowship in Continual Skill Learning in Cyprus / Deadline: 31 March

[Vassilis Vassiliades]

We are accepting applications for PhD fellowships at the CYENS Centre of
Excellence <https://www.cyens.org.cy/en-gb/>, located in sunny Nicosia,
Cyprus. The positions are full-time for 3 years starting from an MSc or
equivalent.

This post concerns the thematic area of *Continual Skill Learning*.

*Short description:*
The field of reinforcement learning (RL) has seen tremendous progress over
the last few years. Despite their impressive (often superhuman)
performance, current RL systems suffer from the following drawbacks: (1)
they are “specialists” rather than “generalists”, i.e., they become highly
specialized to their current task, often forgetting completely how to solve
their previously learned tasks, and (2) they require enormous data and
computational resources for training. In contrast to such systems, human
learning is efficient and robust to changing environments. Our brains can
construct abstract predictive models from their sensorimotor experience
that permit efficient planning, rapidly assimilate new knowledge in memory,
and flexibly use it to build complex skills that are reused in many tasks.
This project aims to make a significant step towards the highly sought goal
of “artificial general intelligence”, by developing software agents that
continually acquire, reuse and improve a variety of skills, similarly to
humans. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to build on top
of the latest research on areas such as continual learning in deep neural
networks, hierarchical reinforcement learning, memory-augmented neural
networks, meta-learning, quality-diversity optimization or open-endedness,
and create procedurally-generated environments in which the developed
agents will be evaluated.

The candidate will be registered at the *University of Cyprus*, but based
at *CYENS *at the "Learning Agents and Robots" research group (
lear.cyens.org.cy). The candidate will have the opportunity to spend
15%-25% of their PhD time at *IT University of Copenhagen* (collaborating
partner).

Questions about the position can be directed to Vassilis Vassiliades,
CYENS, email: v.vassiliades at cyens.org.cy

*For more information and how to apply please visit:*
https://www.cyens.org.cy/en-gb/vacancies/job-listings/research-associates/phd-fellowships-cyens-doctoral-training-progra-1/

*Deadline*: 31 March 2023
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