(With apologies for cross-posting.)

PhD Position: Programming, Modelling and Verification of Concurrent Software

The Software Technologies Research Group at the University of Bamberg, located in a world-heritage city in Northern Bavaria in Germany, conducts research in the foundations and practice of software specification, verification and analysis. The group currently has one full-time PhD position (E13 TV-L, German public sector pay scale) available in the context of a new research project that will develop novel formalisms and techniques for concurrent software systems.

About the topic

Todays ubiquitous multicore computing platforms have changed the landscape of programming languages and their APIs. These focus increasingly on shielding the software engineer from low-level details of threads, concurrency and parallelism via clever abstractions of the underlying platform. Such abstractions are implemented in programming languages and libraries such as Grand Central Dispatch, node.js, OpenMP, Erlang and Go. As concurrent computation platforms arise everywhere, even in safety critical systems, writing software that is correct and safe becomes the engineer's primary concern. However, proving concurrent systems to be a priori correct and safe requires additional research in the theory and practice of programming languages, compilers, verification techniques, and analysis tools. We are looking for a researcher to strengthen our team in one or several of these areas.

Your background and experience

A strong background in Computer Science is required, such as evidenced by an upper class Masters degree in Computer Science or a closely related discipline. We target two not necessarily disjoint types of candidates: First, practitioners with a good knowledge of and experience with modern programming languages (e.g., C++/C#, Java, OCaml) and state-of-the-art concurrent and asynchronous languages and APIs (e.g., Grand Central Dispatch, node.js, OpenMP, Erlang, Go); second, theoreticians with basic knowledge in formal methods and theoretical computer science (e.g., formal semantics, automata theory, graph transformation systems, model checking, and/or compiler construction).

Applicants are expected to be fluent in spoken and written English, some knowledge of German is desirable to support the group's teaching in software engineering and programming languages (up to 5 contact hours per semester week).

Further information and how to apply

Please send your informative CV, copies of transcripts and awarded degrees, and a cover letter outlining your research interests to info(at)swt-bamberg.de. You can address any questions to Prof. Gerald Lüttgen or Dr. Alexander Heußner by using the same email address, and find out additional information about Bamberg's Software Technologies Research Group on its website located at www.uni-bamberg.de/en/swt/.