CALL FOR EXPRESSION OF INTEREST FOR MSCA POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS AT UNIGE - N. 4 COGNITIVE ARC[...]

Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics and Systems Engineering Organisation / Company: University of Genoa Is the Hosting related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No The University of Genoa (UNIGE), located in Genoa, ITALY, welcomes postdoctoral researchers of any nationality with an excellent track record to apply for the European Commission Marie Sklodowska-Curie (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025. Our University has been a beneficiary of several MSCA-PF in Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe. The MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship is a funding scheme of the European Commission’s Horizon Europe Research & Innovation programme, dedicated to excellent research promoting international mobility, as well as interdisciplinary and intersectoral exchanges. The MSCA fellowship grant provides a competitive salary plus mobility and family allowances if applicable, as well as a contribution to cover research, training, and networking costs. The research projects will have 2- or 3-year durations. Selected candidates will be provided with special support for proposal writing and development . The University of Genoa will organize in May the fifth edition of the Masterclass MSCA@UniGe. Selected candidate researchers will have the opportunity to attend a 2-day online intensive training and coaching course on how to write a successful proposal. This masterclass is a pathway of support to candidates and their supervisors in preparing project proposals, including prescreening activities of the draft proposals and the organization of dedicated B2B meetings, by the European Research Office of UniGe, National Contact Point, and other experts. The masterclass will take place on May/June 2025 . MSCA domain: Information Science and Engineering (ENG) Research Group: The Engine Room is a multi-disciplinary team affiliated with the Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics, and Systems Engineering of the University of Genoa, Italy. The team, founded in 2015, aims to foster research in cognitive robotics and applied artificial intelligence. The team exploits a wide range of expertise and know-how in artificial intelligence, machine learning, mechatronics, control, and cognitive science. The team is characterized by a strong experimental attitude, encompassing the whole lifecycle of experimental activities, from idea development to hypothesis formulation to on-field validation. The team cooperates with major research groups worldwide and has access to a wide range of facilities and equipment, as well as advanced sensing and measurement instrumentation. Research Project Description: The goal of a robot cognitive architecture is to provide a robot with a principled, explanatory theory of how to understand relevant traits of the environment where it operates, extract knowledge to inform its goal-oriented decision-making processes, and make it act and move to attain such goals. If robots must operate in environments designed by (and for) humans, these capabilities imply a level of proficiency in sense-making, adaptation, learning, and motion at least comparable to human levels. We believe that one of the major obstacles for a widespread uptake of robots to perceive, reason, and act in common, everyday environments is the lack of a principled, comprehensive understanding of two key components in intelligent behavior, that is, (i) the underlying cognitive principles informing robot behavior while interacting with the environment and the humans therein, and (ii) the relationship between such cognitive principles and the variety of possible robot embodiments. We solicit candidatures in the following directions of inquiry: (i) leverage current thinking in brain cognition to synthesize analogous robot cognitive architectures, based on the principles of modularity, structure, hierarchy, and recursiveness; (ii) overcome the current dichotomy between different architectural choices by adopting a neuro-symbolic approach to AI in their design, which is able to take advantage of both model-based and GenAI approaches; (iii) distribute the robot cognitive functions in the robot “brain” as well as in its “body”, thereby exploiting different computational substrates, based on the principles of intelligent matter and morphological computation; (iv) exploit the normative nature of current proposals in cognitive architectures, that is, avoiding encoding hardcoded behaviors in favor of representing robot behavioral policies that are compatible with principles related to the alignment problem in AI. Application: An expression of interest shall be sent to Prof. Fulvio Mastrogiovanni (...; Orcid ID: 0000-0001-5913-1898) by 5th May 2025. Your file should contain the following elements: For the MSCA-PF 25 call (opening foreseen on 9th April 2025), at the deadline for the submission of proposals (10th September 2025), postdoctoral candidates shall have a maximum of 8 years of postdoctoral research experience and must not have resided or carried out their main activities in Italy (for European Fellowship) or in the Third Country of the outgoing phase (for Global Fellowship) for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to the abovementioned deadline. More info on MSCA PF are available at the following link: #J-18808-Ljbffr