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Research Fellow in Collective Artificial Intelligence for Digital Voting Systems

Are you excited to practice direct digital democracy in real-world using AI-based decision-support systems? Would you join an international project with a team of world-leading partners such as ETH Zurich? Do you aspire to drive research on collective decision-making and digital voting into real-world pilot tests in the city of Aarau in Switzerland?

The Distributed Systems and Services group at University of Leeds has an opening for a Research Fellow in the lab of Distributed and Intelligent Social Computing Systems. The scientific activities of the lab are inter-disciplinary, international and linked to government and industry. 

You will have a PhD (or be close to completion) in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Economics or other relevant area, with solid programming skills applied to learning and optimization problems. You will have an experimental research profile in the area of intelligent multi-agent systems and decision-support systems (reinforcement learning, distributed optimization, recommender systems) and an interest on computational social science and mechanism design (computational social choice, game theory).  You will develop AI models for digitally assisted collective decision-making and digital voting solutions applied to participatory budgeting processes as well as Smart City applications such as energy/traffic management and sharing economies. 

As a Research Fellow in this project, you are expected to develop and study multi-agent decision-support systems for digital voting using distributed AI and optimization techniques, while exploring relevant insights from social science and mechanism design.

Together with the project team, you will apply novel decision-support systems solutions to mobile crowd-sensing platforms and digital voting solutions to empower trustworthy collective decisions in Smart Cities. You will apply data science skills to data collected from citizens to understand collective crowd behaviour and decision-making processes. You will have a unique opportunity to apply this research in real-world by running field tests in the city of Aarau in Switzerland with a strong tradition on direct democracy initiatives. The pilot tests will assess novel participatory budgeting processes. This project will run in collaboration with ETH Zurich and University of Fribourg in Switzerland as well as the city authorities of Aarau.


To explore the post further or for any queries you may have, please contact:

Dr Evangelos Pournaras, Associate Professor  

Tel: + 44 (0) 113 343 5447 or email: E.Pournaras@leeds.ac.uk


Please note: If you are not a British or Irish citizen, from 1 January 2021 you will require permission to work in the UK. This will normally be in the form of a visa but, if you are an EEA/Swiss citizen and resident in the UK before 31 December 2020, this may be your passport or status under the EU Settlement Scheme.


Location:  Leeds - Main Campus
Faculty/Service:  Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences
School/Institute:  School of Computing
Category:  Research
Grade:  Grade 7
Salary:  £33,797 to £40,322 p.a.
Due to funding restrictions, an appointment will not be made higher than £36,914 p.a.
Working Time:  37.5 hours per week
Post Type:  Full Time
Contract Type:  Fixed Term (2 years (grant funding))
Release Date:  Monday 10 May 2021
Closing Date:  Sunday 23 May 2021
Interview Date:  Tuesday 15 June 2021
Reference:  EPSCP1053
Downloads:  Candidate Brief  

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