Announcement a.y. 2024/2025
Annex
Information for prospective applicants
Research project guidelines
Please Note - During the interview, the selection board will verify that the candidate has the necessary fundamental knowledge and skills for attending the doctoral course and assess the eligibility for those scholarships which may be based on specific research themes.
Deadline for application: July 1st, 2024 - 1:00 p.m. CEST
n. 9 positions available, of which:
n. 2 positions funded by Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS Pavia
n. 3 positions funded by Università degli studi di Milano
n. 1 position funded by Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
n. 1 position with scholarship co-funded by National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) - DM 629/2024 – Investment 4.1. Research PNRR, on the following topic: "Mind, self and mathematics". Description: The research will be concerned with those areas of reality that seem to resist a complete naturalization: the nature of mind and the self, and the nature of mathematics. Investigations of mind and the self will focus on topics as: phenomenal consciousness, intentionality, extended mind -- in relation to both the natural and social worlds -- theories of affectivity, philosophy of technology, inflationary or deflationary theories of the self, including multiculutral perspectives. Metaphysical-phenomenological approaches and those related to classical cognitive science or 4E will be particularly appreciated. Investigation in the philosophy of mathematics will include general issues in the theory of knowledge and may focus on either traditional philosophy of mathematics or the philosophy of mathematical practice. Potential topics in the epistemology of mathematics can include: foundationalism about mathematics; themes in individual or social epistemology of mathematical practice; the analysis of mathematical languages, notations and diagrams; and mathematical explanation and understanding. [PNRR PhD Research Scholarship: specific constraints apply; see call for details].
n. 1 position with scholarship co-funded by National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) - DM 629/2024 – Investment 4.1. Public Administration, on the following topic: “Disagreement, pluralism and trust: human decisions and technologyin public policies”. Description: The research will focus on epistemological issues (esp. as regards social epistemology) that can influence the design of public policies, support the training of management staff in public administrations, and promote informed models of governance, also in light of the technological innovations that increasingly assist decision-making. The research may concern, in particular, the epistemology of disagreement, with an emphasis on expert disagreement, group justification, and group knowledge, and the epistemological investigation of trust in science and in experts' opinions by public decision-makers and individual stakeholders. Special attention may be given to decision-making in the context of a pluralism of scientific views and, more generally, to the benefits and risks that technological innovations, algorithmic decision-making, and artificial intelligence entail in the case of public policies and their impact on society. The project will be conducted in collaboration with SNA (Scuola Nazionale dell'Amministrazione, Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, Rome). [PNRR PhD Scholarship with Public Administration: specific constraints apply; see call for details].
Institution involved: Scuola Nazionale dell’Amministrazione
n. 1 position with scholarship co-funded under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) - DM 630/2024 – Investment 3.3. Innovative Doctorates, on the following topic: "Mitigating Bias and opacity Risks in generative AI". Description: The PhD Research will contribute to extending the methodology and application developed within the ongoing collaboration between the Department of Philosophy at the University of Milan and Alkemy, started in the context of the PRIN 2020 project BRIO (Bias, Risk and Opacity in AI, PI: Prof. Giuseppe Primiero). The collaboration has produced a scientifically grounded methodology and a tool which implements a combination of statistical and formal techniques for the detection of bias and the measurement of risks in AI models. The methodology is especially characterized by transparency and model agnosticism. Currently, the developed tool has few crucial conceptual and technical limitations. For the former, it still misses an explicit treatment of model opacity: such a task shall be based on the study and analysis of current literature and formal approaches to counterfactual fairness, to extract feature relevance and causal-like properties of opaque models. These aspects will be investigated through appropriate semantic and proof-theoretic systems. From the technical viewpoint, the BRIO tool is currently only able to work on tabular data. This reduces its applicability to the context of multi-modal datasets, crucially important for new Generative AI systems like text-to-image and text-to-audio generators. The research will explore the application of the BRIO tool to explore bias and socially relevant risks in such AI systems. [PNRR PhD Scholarship for Innovative Doctorates: specific constraints apply; see call for details].
Company involved: Alkemy
Test schedule
The results about the evaluation process will be published on the IUSS website http://www.iusspavia.it.
The interviews will be held starting 16/07/2024 at 14:00 CEST in presence at IUSS School, or remotely via Zoom.
