These PhD and Postdoc positions are 聽hosted by聽INRIA at Sophia Antipolis. The PhD degree is granted by the Universit茅 C么te d'Azur (UCA) and it聽develops within a close collaboration between INRIA, the University of She铿僥ld (TUOS) and Princeton University (PU) in the broad intersection of information theory, game theory, and artificial intelligence. Mobility between INRIA,聽the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at TUOS, as well as the department of Electrical Engineering at PU, is expected.听
This project aims to build a mathematical theory to understand, model and determine the fundamental limits of the in铿倁ence that an information provider (IP), e.g., a social network or a recommender system, can exert over decision makers. The focus is on the case in which the bene铿乼 obtained by an individual decision maker depends upon the decisions of all involved individuals. This situation arises in most decision making processes involving humans, machines or humans and machines:聽(a) Influencers that attempt to manipulate voters, for instance in an election; (b) Marketing policies that propose goods to potential costumers; (c) Geo-localization-based navigation applications that provide advice to drivers; (d) Stock traders that follow di铿erent sources of information to buy, sell and trade shares; and (e) Environmental managers who seek for coordination in a 鈥渢ragedy of the commons鈥 problem.
In a nutshell, in most decision making processes, decisions are made with partial information about the stochastic phenomena underlying the environment in which decision-makers interact. Therefore, IPs play a central role consisting in information provisioning, which is an opportunity to steer the behavior of individuals and seek for particular outcomes. That is, information can be provided to an individual for increasing its bene铿乼, but also, information can be withhold or distorted for penalizing individuals. Either way, this vulnerability to malicious or undesired in铿倁ence represents a thread for any decentralized decision making process and thus, it must be understood and properly modeled.
Interested candidates should contact聽 Samir M. Perlaza at [email protected].听