Distributed Artificial Intelligence for Collective Decisions in Smart Cities

Can you envision a more inclusive and direct democracy for our digital society empowered by an ethically-aligned AI and blockchain? The Distributed Systems and Services group at University of Leeds has an opening for a PhD candidate position in the lab of Distributed and Intelligent Social Computing Systems. 

As a PhD candidate in this project you are expected to develop and study decision-support systems using blockchain and distributed AI for multi-agent systems (reinforcement learning, distributed combinatorial optimization). You will apply these decision-support systems to mobile crowd-sensing platforms and digital voting systems to empower trustworthy collective decisions in Smart Cities. You will apply data science skills to data collected from citizens to understand collective crowd behaviour. You will have a unique opportunity to apply this research in real-world by running pilots tests in the city of Aarau in Switzerland with a strong tradition on direct democracy initiatives. This project will run in collaboration with ETH Zurich and University of Fribourg in Switzerland as well as the city authorities of Aarau.