A social science perspective on cultural knowledge evolution

Post-doctoral position / Sujet de post-doctorat

Sought profile: We are investigating the cultural evolution of knowledge and beliefs on a computational basis. We seek to cooperate with scientists trained in social sciences and the humanities offering their specific perspective on this work. Given the transverse position of cultural evolution in all SSH, this may be relevant to various fields: The research may concern social aspects of cultural evolution (sociology, epistemology) or focus on the motivation and individual knowledge and behaviour of agents (cognitive science, psychology) or taking an intermediary position linking knowledge and society (anthropology). Similarly we are open to experimental, observational or theoretical profiles.

The selected candidate will have for main activities to develop research linking her or his own disciplinary perspective and research to the work in cultural knowledge evolution.

About mOeX: Cultural evolution is the application of evolution theory to culture [Messoudi 2006]. It is now widely acknowledged in social sciences and the humanities. mOeX adopts a computational approach to the study of the cultural evolution of knowledge, determining, in silico, properties of knowledge that artificial agents may obtain. Our ambition is to understand and develop general mechanisms by which a society evolves its knowledge. For that purpose, we combine knowledge representation and experimental cultural evolution methods [Steels, 2012]. The former provides formal models of knowledge; the latter provides a well-defined framework for studying situated evolution. We consider societies of agents representing their knowledge and adapting it when interacting with each other. We study the global properties of local adaptation operators both

See the mOeX web site for more information.

This action is part of an ambitious program towards what we call cultural knowledge evolution within the MIAI Knowledge communication and evolution chair.

Keywords: cultural evolution, knowledge, belief, evolutionary epistemology, behaviour, society, communication

References:

[Bourahla, 2021] Yasser Bourahla, Manuel Atencia, Jérôme Euzenat, Knowledge improvement and diversity under interaction-driven adaptation of learned ontologies, Proc. 20th ACM international conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS), London (UK), pp242-250, 2021 https://moex.inria.fr/files/papers/bourahla2021a.pdf
[Euzenat, 2017] Jérôme Euzenat, Communication-driven ontology alignment repair and expansion, Proc. 26th International joint conference on artificial intelligence (IJCAI), Melbourne (AU), pp185-191, 2017 https://moex.inria.fr/files/papers/euzenat2017a.pdf
[Mesoudi, 2006] Alex Mesoudi, Andrew Whiten, Kevin Laland, Towards a unfied science of cultural evolution, Behavioral and brain sciences 29(4):329–383, 2006 http://alexmesoudi.com/s/Mesoudi_Whiten_Laland_BBS_2006.pdf
[Steels, 2012] Luc Steels (ed.), Experiments in cultural language evolution, John Benjamins, Amsterdam (NL), 2012
[van den Berg, 2021] Line van den Berg, Manuel Atencia, Jérôme Euzenat, A logical model for the ontology alignment repair game, Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems 35(2):32, 2021 https://moex.inria.fr/files/papers/vandenberg2021a.pdf

Links


Qualification: PhD or equivalent.

Researched skills:

Place of work: The position is located at INRIA Grenoble Rhône-Alpes, Montbonnot (near Grenoble, France) a main computer science research lab, in a stimulating research environment.

Environnement: The work will be carried out in the mOeX team common to INRIA & Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble. mOeX is dedicated to study knowledge evolution through adaptation. It gather permanent researchers from the Exmo team which has taken an active part these past 15 years in the development of the semantic web and more specifically ontology matching.

Hiring date: 2022.

Duration: 12-18 months (hiring opportunities afterwards)

Salary: From 2125€/month (benefits included, net before income tax), i.e., 2653€/month gross.

Contact: For further information, contact Jerome:Euzenat#inria:fr.

Procedure: Contact us (do not wait).
There are two opportunities to address that topic:

It should be possible to do both.

File: Provide Vitæ, motivation letter, 2 relevant or significant publications and reference letters.