Engineer F/M : Agent-based cultural evolution simulator software engineer

About Inria

Inria is the national research institute dedicated to digital sciences and technologies. It employs 2600 people. Its 215 agile project teams, generally shared with academic partners, involve more than 3900 scientists to meet the challenges of digital technology, often at the interface of other disciplines. The institute calls on numerous talents in more than forty different professions. 900 support staff for research and innovation contribute to the emergence and growth of scientific or entrepreneurial projects that impact the world. Inria works with many companies and has supported the creation of more than 200 start-ups. The institute thus strives to respond to the challenges of the digital transformation of science, society, and the economy.

About the center or functional directorate

The Centre Inria de l'Université de Grenoble groups together almost 450 people in 26 research teams and 9 research support departments.

Staff is present on three campuses in Grenoble, in close collaboration with other research and higher education institutions (Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, CEA, INRAE, ...), but also with key economic players in the area.

The Centre Inria de l'Université Grenoble Alpes is active in the fields of high-performance computing, verification and embedded systems, modeling of the environment at multiple levels, and data science and artificial intelligence. The center is a top-level scientific institute with an extensive network of international collaborations in Europe and the rest of the world.

Context and advantages of the position

Environment: The work will be carried out in the common to INRIA & University Grenoble Alpes within the Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble (UGA - CNRS - INRIA - Grenoble INP).

Group: The work will be carried out in the team common to & . mOeX is dedicated to study knowledge evolution through adaptation. It gathers researchers which have taken an active part in the development of the semantic web and more specifically ontology matching and data interlinking.

Place of work: The position is located at (near Grenoble, France), a main computer science research lab, in a stimulating research environment.

Assigned mission

The mOeX team investigates the cultural evolution of knowledge and beliefs on a computational basis. For that purpose, we design and perform agent-based simulations. The goal of this position (32 months) is to develop and maintain a simulator based on novel models allowing agents to play different games and games to be played by different types of agents using the same knowledge.

Cultural evolution is the application of evolution theory to culture. It has been applied to various aspects of our life in societies: from customs to languages, from boat shapes to company structures [Messoudi, 2011]. In our context, culture is the beliefs and knowledge of agents, that determine their behaviour. Cultural evolution has been the subject of multi-agent simulation [Axelrod, 1997; Steels, 2012; Acerbi et al., 2022]. Artificial cultural evolution, like artificial intelligence for intelligence, aims at considering the general principles and mechanisms governing cultural evolution.

For that purpose, we aim at defining a model of cultural evolution experiments that allows different types of agents to play different types of games. This model will be supported by a simulation environment to test cultural evolution hypotheses and ensure the reproducibility and availability of such experiments. We also seek at promoting this approach towards social scientists interested in cultural evolution.

The recruited candidate will have for main task to develop and maintain an agent-based simulator allowing users to develop their own games and their own agents or to choose from a library of such. It would allow to describe experiment setups involving them that can then be performed and analysed.

The simulator may be a largely reworked version of our Lazy lavender simulator or a completely new design, possibly using an existing basis.

Beyond this core task, the candidate will participate to related tasks such a participating to the definition of the model to be implemented, offering support for analysing and publishing results and promoting the resulting system.

Main activities

The recruited candidate will have for main tasks to:

• Develop and maintain an artificial cultural evolution simulator

but other tasks include:

• Participating to the definition of the model
• Design some support documentation
• Integrating support for experiment reproducibility
• Taking part to the ACBE project dissemination effort, in particular through publishing papers

Skills

• Master or equivalent in computer science. The position could be requalified as post-doctoral.

Researched skills:

• Programming capabilities (Java, other to be considered)
• Ability to work in a team
• Attracted by research work
• Acquainted to simulation and agent-based simulation
• Willingness to tackle new and challenging problems.

Benefits

• Subsidized meals
• Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
• Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
• Possibility of teleworking and flexible organization of working hours
• Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.)
• Social, cultural and sports events and activities
• Access to vocational training
• Social security coverage under conditions

Compensation

From 2,692 € (depending on experience and qualifications).