Bergen University College, Faculty of Engineering, has an open position for a PhD student in logics for multi-agent systems. The contract is for 4 years with 25% teaching duties.
The PhD student will be attached to the Department of Computer Engineering, and the position is in the faculty`s prioritised area software development. The position forms a part of the faculty`s research programme in software development for distributed systems which is being developed to be one of the University College`s strategic research programmes. The programme currently involves 7 permanent professors and associate professors and several PhD and masters students. The Department is responsible for the bachelor programmes in computer engineering and information technology, as well as a masters programme in software development in collaboration with Department of Informatics, University of Bergen.

Multi-agent systems are software systems consisting of interacting autonomous components called agents. Autonomy entails that an agent`s behaviour is determined by its individual goals and beliefs about its environments, as opposed to central control. Agents need a way to represent their beliefs about the rest of the system, and a mechanism for reasoning about the system. When we design multi-agent systems we need a way to specify their properties and a method for verifying that a system has a given property. These are some of the reasons formal logic is considered to form one of the formal underpinnings of multi-agent systems. Logic is used for knowledge representation for agents, and is the foundation for tools which let us specify, verify and automatically synthesise multi-agent systems. Logics suitable for this purpose are logics for reasoning about various aspects of interaction. Such aspects include epistemic, intentional, strategic, normative, temporal, etc.

Compiled using software from Scholarship Education Website