PhD in Computer Science

The Faculty of Sciences and Bioengineering Sciences, Department Computer Science, is looking for a PhD-student with a doctoral grant. 

More concretely your work package, for the preparation of a doctorate, contains: 

Reinforcement Learning for Public Health Decision Support in Emerging Arbovirus Prevention

The Artificial Intelligence Lab in the Department of Computer Science at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) is looking for a motivated PhD researcher in Computer Science to join a new interdisciplinary project on arbovirus prevention and control in the European Union. The project is led by Prof. Pieter Libin and is embedded in a collaboration with Hasselt University and Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma.

Project

Mosquito-borne arboviruses such as Zika (ZIKV) and Oropouche (OROV) are expected to pose increasing risks to public health in Europe. This project aims to develop a new data-driven framework to assess invasion risk and optimize mitigation and surveillance strategies in the EU. The research combines epidemiological modelling, proxy-data fitting, and reinforcement learning for public-health decision support.

As the Computer Science PhD researcher, you will lead the research on novel reinforcement learning algorithms and contribute to the joint development of the broader modelling and policy framework. Your work will focus on multi-criteria reinforcement learning, uncertainty-aware decision-making, and explainable reinforcement learning for large-scale public-health applications.

You will:

• develop new multi-criteria reinforcement learning algorithms for complex decision problems:
  • you design methods that exploit the geographical structure of metapopulation models;
  • you investigate uncertainty-aware policy learning;
• develop explainable RL methods to communicate learned policies to policymakers;
• collaborate on the epidemiological model used in the project;
• contribute to the study of mitigation and surveillance strategies, including mosquito control, vaccination policies, and surveillance strategies;
• publish results in leading conferences and journals and present your work internationally.

For this function, our Brussels Humanities, Sciences & Engineering Campus (Elsene) will serve as your home base.