Department: Department of Engineering Management
Regime Full-time
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The Department of Engineering Management in the Faculty of Business and Economics is looking for a full-time (100%) doctoral scholarship holder in the field of cognitive robotics
The vacancy is situated within an international Human Frontier Science Project entitled “Mental 3D space-time travel in fission-fusion animal societies”.
Humans readily use and share information about each other’s past and present to plan for the future and coordinate their actions. By contrast, the extent to which animals think/communicate about the past or future to plan behaviors has yet to be elucidated. The university of Antwerp is a partner in an international consortium that will investigate the mental travel through space and time of animals through behavioral experiments on animals and robots. Our role in this project will be to propose and experimentally validate hypotheses of planning mechanisms as derived from behavioral experiments with bats, dolphins and parrots. The experimental platform consists of a group of 10 custom designed mobile robots programmed in Python. In the past, we have developed a biologically plausible navigation mechanism based on semi-metric maps of the environment that will be enriched to contain relevant time information as well. Combining reinforcement learning with these biomimetic memory structures, the robotic agents will attempt to model the behaviors observed in the animal experiments. The goal of the robotic work is to propose and test minimalist cognitive models for the mechanisms operating in the animals’ heads.
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The University of Antwerp received the European Commission’s HR Excellence in Research Award for its HR policy. We are a sustainable, family-friendly organisation which invests in its employees’ growth. We encourage diversity and attach great importance to an inclusive working environment and equal opportunities, regardless of gender identity, disability, race, ethnicity, religion or belief, sexual orientation or age. We encourage people from diverse backgrounds and with diverse characteristics to apply.
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