PhD Scholarship in privacy, or fairness at the university of Neuchatel, Swizerland

We are looking for a PhD student to join our group on reinforcement learning and decision making under uncertainty more generally, at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland (https://www.unine.ch/). We are particularly interested in candidates with a strong mathematical background. Prior research experience as documented by your Masters thesis is required. Within the area, we are looking for candidates with a strong research interest in the following fields

Reinforcement learning and decision making under uncertainty:

• Exploration in reinforcement learning.
• Decision making nuder partial information.
• Representations of uncertainty in decision making.
• Theory of reinforcement learning (e.g. PAC/regret bounds)
• Bayesian inference and approximate Bayesian methods.

Social aspect of machine learning

• Theory of differntial privacy.
• Algorithms for differentially private machine learning.
• Algorithms for fairness in machine learning.
• Interactions between machine learning and game theory.
• Inference of human models of fairness or privacy.

The main supervisor will be Christos Dimitrakakis 

Examples of our group’s past and current research can be found on arxiv: https://arxiv.org/search/?searchtype=author&query=Dimitrakakis%2C+C.

The student will have the opportunity to visit and work with other group members at the University of Oslo, Norway ( https://www.mn.uio.no/ifi/english/people/aca/chridim/index.html ) and Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden ( http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~chrdimi/ ).

Excellent technical skills in calculus, linear algebra, probability as well as competence in at least one programming language is expected. In addition, the doctoral student must have a strong background, as evidenced by their master thesis, in one of the following areas:

• Fairness.
• Privacy.
• Reinforcement learning.
• Game theory.
• Economics.
• Statistical inference.

Application Information 

Starting date: 1 September 2022 or soon afterwards.
Application deadline:  31 May 2022.
The PhD is fully funded, and normally lasts 4 years, with approximate 25% of the time as a teaching assistant.

To apply send an email to christos.dimitrakakis at unine.ch with the subject ‘PhD Neuchatel’.

An application must include:

• A statement of research interests and motivation relevant to the position.
• A CV with a list of references.
• Your MSc thesis (or a draft) or another research work demonstrating your academic writing.
• A degree transcript.