The topics below are guaranteed funding and interest. That said, this list is incomplete; we are open to other topics!
Recognizing Goals and Plans Interactively
The goal of this thesis would be to develop the next generation of algorithms for plan recognition (inferring someone’s plan from observations of their actions), and goal recognition (inferring their goal). Current algorithms assume that the set of goals (and their priors) are fixed. But humans seem to recognize goals dynamically. Join us to discover new algorithms!
Predicting the Future: Social Simulation with Qualitative Reasoning
The goal of the thesis would be to explore the use of qualitative modeling methods (an established area of AI) to model and predict social phenomena. Qualitative modeling allows scientists to represent the qualitative factors that influence the system, and their interactions, without using exact measures (which they don’t have). Fridman and Kaminka (TIST 2013) showed that this can be done to predict the level of violence in demonstrations.
This is a good topic for someone with political science, social sciences, or macro-level economics background. It would involve: finding what to model (e.g., peace negotiations? economic crises? urbanization?), modeling using existing tools, and then extending the tools with new algorithms. It does not require a lot of programming or heavy computer science background.