Internship Meeting Agents and Preference Modelling

(download the full internship description: almende_internship_personal_portal.doc)

1. Introduction

Almende is offering an internship opportunity for a graduate student to study evolutionary preference modeling techniques in multi-agent systems for supporting business and social networks.

Agenda management can be a time consuming activity, especially when there is a lot of people involved, or changes occur frequently. This is because in both cases, communication is required to adjust the planning. Humans are not very well equipped for a lot of communication with a lot of different actors. Software agents on the other hand, are excellently suited for communication purposes. They are in principle able to communicate with thousands of other agents in a fraction of the time.
However, there is another important aspect involved in coordination for meetings between people. There are a lot of implicit and continuously changing preferences involved which play a role in the decision and preference of humans. These preferences can change gradually over time, but are often also dependent on the actual context of people. To be able to incorporate these issues in a multi-agent system, to allow fast and flexible coordination of meetings, we need techniques to model the preferences of humans.

2. Research Description

Almende thinks that the traditional modeling of preferences, explicit and a priori as a sort of profile, does not suffice. We need a more dynamic approach. We need techniques to model preferences through the interaction of humans with their agents and with each other. The feedback (implicit or explicit) obtained combined with the actual context, should allow us to learn certain preferences of human actors. An important constraint in this respect is the need for control at the human level. Somehow, the human user should always be in control of the actions and decisions of the system.

3. Requirements

The research proposed requires not only an emphasis on the preference modeling techniques, but also on mechanisms to incorporate the technology into complex business networks and facilitate human cooperation. Although affinity with ICT (especially multi-agent systems) is a pro, we do not ask of students to be expert programmers, software developers. These tasks are supported within the Almende organization.

We are looking for a graduate student who is in the final stage of his/her study, and has affinity with ICT, especially multi-agent systems, in combination with business networks and network theory. This internship can start anywhere from January 2009.

The internship will be supervised  by dr. Wolf Ketter from Erasmus University.

Applications:
To apply, please send your letter of motivation and your CV (in Dutch or English) to Jan Peter Larsen (jp @ almende (dot) com) or Wolf Ketter ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it - LARGE)

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