In this PhD project you will develop reactive, Bayesian AI agents that run on portable devices. We take inspiration from how the brain spontaneously reacts to sensory input, as formally laid out by the 'Free Energy Principle' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle(FEP). We develop Bayesian AI agents that, similar to the brain, learn purposeful behavior solely through environdmental interactions.To support this research, we are developping a custom reactive probabilistic Programming toolbox named Rxlnfer (see http://rxinfer.ml). RxInfer supports real-time reactive Bayesian inference for AI agents. In your PhD research you will advance both fundamental and practical development of RxInfer and seek novel application areas for reactive probabilistic programming.
Job Description This PhD project is funded by the
ROBUST program (https://icai.ai/labs-robust/) that aims to develop trustworthy AI tools for today's big societal challenges. One of these challenges concerns improving the participation of hearing-impaired persons in challenging work and social settings. In this PhD project, you will develop probabilistic programming tools for real-time AI agents that support situated (i.e., real-time, in-situ) development of personalized audio processing algorithms for hearing aid clients. Your algorithms will be implemented on portable devices and operate under computational and energy-consumption constraints.
An substantial part of the PhD research will be devoted to further development of RxInfer (
http://rxinfer.ml), which is a high-quality toolbox-under-development for automating real-time Bayesian inference. Your work will partly consist of developing and coding fundamental (Bayesian) AI tools, and partly on applying these tools to developing AI agents that learn to personalize (recommend) hearing aid algorithms through situated interactions between the agent and a human client. Therefore, for a perfect fit with this position, you should have a keen interest and background in both quality software development and in Bayesian machine learning methods. RxInfer is based on a Reactive Programming framework and coded in Julia, see
http://rxinfer.ml.
You will work in the
BIASlab team (
http://biaslab.org) in the Electrical Engineering department at TU/e. This lab focuses its research activities on transferring a leading physics-based theory about computation in the brain, the Free Energy Principle (FEP), to practical use in synthetic AI agents. During this project you will closely collaborate with other BIASlab researchers, as well as with project team members at the Human Technology Interaction lab (
https://tinyurl.com/2jno83f6), and with our industrial hearing device partner GN Hearing.
Key areas of interest include software development, Bayesian machine learning, probabilistic graphical models (factor graphs), ,signal processing and computational neurosciences.
This research project requires a multidisciplinary approach and draws from Bayesian machine learning, computational neuroscience, and professional-level software development. See this
youtube presentation (
https://youtu.be/QYbcm6G_wsk) on Natural Artificial Intelligence for more information about our research.