Phd position f/m phd thesis: artificial cultural belief evolution: flexibility experiments

PhD Position F/M PhD thesis: Artificial cultural belief evolution: flexibility experiments

Le descriptif de l’offre ci-dessous est en Anglais

Type de contrat : CDD

Niveau de diplôme exigé : Bac + 5 ou équivalent

Fonction : Doctorant

Niveau d'expérience souhaité : Jeune diplômé

A propos du centre ou de la direction fonctionnelle

The Centre Inria de l’Université de Grenoble groups together almost 450 people in 26 research teams and 9 research support departments.

Staff is present on three campuses in Grenoble, in close collaboration with other research and higher education institutions (Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, CEA, INRAE, …), but also with key economic players in the area.

The Centre Inria de l’Université Grenoble Alpes is active in the fields of high-performance computing, verification and embedded systems, modeling of the environment at multiple levels, and data science and artificial intelligence. The center is a top-level scientific institute with an extensive network of international collaborations in Europe and the rest of the world.

Mission confiée

Cultural evolution is the application of evolutionary theory to culture. Like evolution it relies on variation, transmission and selection. However, these can occur in various forms which can compensate each other. Multi-agent simulations can be used to understand how this happens and how it affects agents' culture.

Cultural evolution is the application of evolution theory to culture. It has been applied to various aspects of our life in societies: from customs to languages, from boat shapes to company structures [Messoudi, 2011]. In our context, culture is the beliefs and knowledge of agents, that determine their behaviour. Cultural evolution has been the subject of multi-agent simulation [Axelrod, 1997; Steels, 2012; Acerbi et al., 2022]. Artificial cultural evolution, like artificial intelligence for intelligence, aims at considering the general principles and mechanisms governing cultural evolution.

For that purpose, we aim at defining a model of cultural evolution experiments that allows different types of agents to play different types of games. This model will be supported by a simulation environment to test cultural evolution hypotheses and ensure the reproducibility and availability of such experiments. We also seek at promoting this approach towards social scientists interested in cultural evolution.

In this context, this PhD proposal aims at instantiating this general model into specific experimental designs investigating two specific directions.

The first direction is to reproduce and extend previous experiments on knowledge and belief evolution [Bourahla et al., 2021; 2022], within a more flexible simulation framework. These experiments will study the influence of multiple populations and generations of agents on the quality and diversity of knowledge developed while playing different games. This will require a conceptual reflection on the nature of populations and generations.

The second direction aims at identifying in such experiments the source of knowledge variation, transmission and selection so that they can be controlled. Indeed, within cultural evolution, they may occur at different stages, e.g. vertical and horizontal transmission, selection by the environment and selection by the agents, and may be combined, e.g. variation or selection occurring at transmission time. Moreover, an occurrence may compensate another: variation during vertical transmission may be compensated by variation during horizontal transmission [Bourahla et al., 2022]. Experiment designs should make it explicit in order to determine that these three operations are indeed necessary for knowledge to evolve, and to characterise their relative influence on the quality and diversity of the resulting knowledge.

These experiments will directly inform the general model design.

References:

[Acerbi et al., 2022] Alberto Acerbi, Alex Mesoudi, Marco Smolla, Individual-based models of cultural evolution. A step-by-step guide using R, Routledge, London (UK), 2022 et. al., 2022] Yasser Bourahla, Manuel Atencia, Jérôme Euzenat, Knowledge transmission and improvement across generations do not need strong selection, Proc. 21st AAMAS, (Online), pp163–171, 2022, John Benjamins, Amsterdam (NL), 2012

Links:

1. mOeX web site: Experiment repository:

Principales activités

Doctoral school: (Jerome:David#univ-grenoble-alpes:fr) and

Place of work: The position is located at

Compétences

Qualification: Master or equivalent in computer science.

Researched skills:

Curiosity and openness. Interaction with other researchers. Autonomous researcher. Interests in agent-based simulation and/or cultural evolution. Innovative.

Avantages

Subsidized meals Partial reimbursement of public transport costs Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.) Possibility of teleworking and flexible organization of working hours Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.) Social, cultural and sports events and activities Access to vocational training Social security coverage under condition

Rémunération

2300 euros gross salary /month