Post-Doctoral Fellowship
Instituto de Biociências, Letras e Ciências Exatas – IBILCE
Universidade Estadual Paulista – UNESP
Supervisor: Geraldo Nunes Silva
We have a postdoc fellowship position open to applicants of any nationality, to work on the project MAGIC – Multi-Agent Control and Estimation for Multi-Horizon Goals Conciliation. This opportunity is within the Cooperation Agreements between Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology – FCT and Sao Paulo Research Foundation – FAPESP – Call for Proposals (2018) and is also part of the Center for Mathematical Sciences Applied to Industry.
The postdoc fellow will be part of the Brazilian team and will be primarily working at Institute of Biosciences, Letters and Exact Sciences – IBILCE, with opportunities to also interact with researchers from Portugal.
Research Topic Description
This project concerns the design, development, analysis, and synthesis of a novel control and estimation architecture for multi-agent systems in which short term individual goals conflict with the long term desirable, or even non-negotiable, system evolution. The envisaged control and estimation framework is a kernel to feed Decision-Support Systems for all decision-making instances within the system.
The range of problems motivating such an architecture is extremely diverse and pervasive: sustainable exploitation of natural resources, governance of production and consumption systems, management of all sorts of societal systems (health, education, mobility, entertainment, etc.), and, among others, control of artificial systems subject to constraints on the required resources.
The research effort in this project will deal with Sustainable Management of Agricultural Production Factors.
A Basic Mathematical Framework for Networked Multi-Time Horizon Conciliating Coordinated Control – An abstract bi-level framework will be formulated in order to take into account, not only the behavior of the various, possibly interacting, agents (dynamic systems) while optimizing their own performance functions in the short term subject to their constraints, as well as, the decision-making coordinating process that, by specifying appropriate control constraints for each one of the agents, ensures that a global target or performance level of common interest is attained.
Thus, the proposed framework encompasses two types of problems: The decision-making/optimal control problem for each agent, and the decision making problem of the coordinator that specifies a “fair” penalization for each one of the agents. One important challenge consists in the specification of a set of assumptions enabling the prediction of future behaviors of the various agents. Another key challenge consists in the choice of performance functional so that “fairness” is an attribute of the resulting coordinating strategy.
Candidate Skills
This Post-Doctoral Position is to be filled with a person who has a strong background in control theory and\or optimization with some experience in computer programming and systems simulation. It is expected that the successful candidate has good teamwork and leadership skills and is willing collaborate with both teams in Brazil and Portugal.
Fellowship
- The selected candidate will be awarded with a FAPESP Post-Doctoral fellowship. It includes a monthly stipend of R$ 7,373.10 [1] plus a research contingency fund of 15% of the annual value of the fellowship, each year. For more details, please see www.fapesp.br/en/5427, modality (a) — the process to which the fellowship is linked is 2018/08036-8.
- doctorate degree must have been earned no longer than seven years before the beginning of the postdoc fellowship
- The fellowship is for two years, renewable for one more year.
Application instructions
- The position is available immediately, with application subject to approval by FAPESP.
- Applications will be accepted until November 30, 2019.
- Interested candidates should submit an email to geraldo.silva@unesp.br, containing the following information:
- – a Resumé and full academic records, including GPA,
- – a brief cover letter explaining research experiences, how research interests fit the goals of the project, career plans, and convenient starting date,
- – the names and contact information of two references familiar with the applicant’s research and academic work,
- – list of scientific publications including Master and PhD Theses.
Further information
For additional information, please contact geraldo.silva@unesp.br
