We have an opening for a Tenure-Track Professorship in the field of Responsible Computing within the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of Vienna. We are seeking applicants with a strong background in Computer Science and an excellent research record in responsible computing, as evidenced by publications in relevant top venues (such as ACM CHI, ACM FAccT, ACM AIES, NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, or the ACM Journal on Responsible Computing) and by successful acquisition of research grants.

The goal of this PhD is to explore a minimal model of decision making using a simulated agent in a contiguous environment (T-Maze like). The goal for the agent is to learn to alternate between left and right, independently of the geometry of the maze, even though topology remains the same. This will be done using an echo state network of limited size in order to be able to perform a thorough analysis of its dynamics and representations from three different perspectives (sensory-motor space, external behavior and neural activity). The goal is to find the conditions for the emergence of concepts such as left and right using a manifold-based approach and to prove for their existence independently an external observer.