Summer school on bidirectional transformations

Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, UK
25th to 29th July 2016
http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/projects/tlcbx/ssbx/

TOPIC

Bidirectional transformations (BX) are means of maintaining consistency between multiple information sources: when one source is edited, the others may need updating to restore consistency. BX have applications in databases, user interface design, model-driven development, and many other domains. This summer school is one of the closing activities on the "Theory of Least Change for BX" project at Oxford and Edinburgh. It brings together leading researchers in BX, spanning theory and
practice, for a week of lectures in beautiful Oxford. It will be aimed at doctoral students in computer science, but will also be suitable for strong master's students and for researchers.

Read more »

PhD studentships in programming languages, provenance, data management

I am currently advertising two PhD studentships, on topics spanning programming languages, provenance, and data management, to start in fall 2016. 

Both of these studentships are fully funded for applicants of any nationality (in contrast to many UK PhD studentships which are only funded up to the UK/EU tuition level, and do not cover full tuition fees for students from outside the European Union.)
Read more »

Call for participation: DBPL 2015

The 15th International Symposium on Database Programming Languages
http://2015.splashcon.org/track/dbpl2015
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
October 27, 2015
hosted as part of SPLASH 2015

Call for Participation

DBPL has a long tradition of bringing databases and programming languages together. This year we continue this tradition by co-locating DBPL with SPLASH 2015, and presenting an interesting mix of papers with programming language and database aspects. In addition to these papers we have an excellent invited talk by Marko Rodriguez of DataStax about Gremlin: A Stream-Based Functional Language for OLTP and OLAP Graph Computing. We hope to see you in Pittsburgh!

DBPL is held in cooperation with ACM SIGPLAN, and gratefully acknowledges support from LogicBlox, Inc.

Read more »

PhD studentship in data-centric programming at LFCS, University of Edinburgh

A fully-funded 3-year PhD studentship has become available in LFCS in data-centric programming.  Applications and expressions of interest are welcome now, with a closing date of April 28, 2014.

This studentship is partly funded by a EU FP7 project (DIACHRON) and partly by a Google Research Award.  The funding includes UK/EU tuition and fees, and a non-taxable stipend of approximately £13,800 per year for 3 years; a small amount of additional funding is available that may be used flexibly for equipment, travel or additional stipend support. 

Read more »

More PhD opportunities: data science and pervasive parallelism

Another advertisement...

My department has been awarded two EPSRC Centres for Doctoral Training in the areas of:

• Data Science (machine learning, databases, algorithms and big data, and applications
• Pervasive Parallelism (architecture, parallel programming, agent-based systems, verification, concurrency, distribution)

Applications are now being accepted for 10 PhD students in each area starting in September 2014.

These PhD programs are structured as 1 year of taught classes leading to a MSc, followed by a 3-year PhD project.  Thus, they are suitable for well-prepared students with a strong undergraduate degree.  Students already holding a MSc degree can potentially proceed directly to the PhD program.  Both programs have numerous industry partners and offer many opportunities for career development for students interested in either an academic or industry career, including support from Edinburgh's commercialization team (the strongest in the UK measured in terms of number of startup companies).

Available funding covers fees for UK or EU students plus a stipend of approximately £13,700/year for living expenses.  Well-qualified applicants of other nationalities are welcome and can be considered for fully-funded positions, but are encouraged to investigate supplementary funding sources that would cover the difference in fees.

There are two deadlines for applications: for full consideration apply by 27 January 2014. (Any non-EU candidates must apply by this date, and also make a separate application for a Edinburgh Global Research Scholarship). Any remaining scholarships will be awarded after the second round deadline of 31 March 2014.

Application information is here:

• http://datascience.inf.ed.ac.uk/apply/
• http://pervasiveparallelism.inf.ed.ac.uk/how-to-apply/

PhD opportunities in data-centric programming at LFCS, University of Edinburgh

And now for a word from our sponsors...

I would like to recruit 1-2 PhD students, working on any of the following topics (with further details given at the associated links). 

• Language-based provenance security: Provenance-based security and audit; applications to slicing, failure analysis for system configuration languages; information-flow and provenance-tracking for multi-tier programs; designing new [functional/declarative] languages or dynamic information flow analyses for secure, high-reliability datacenter programming
• Data-centric programming and provenance: Types and language design for integrating multiple data-centric programming models; language-integrated query; extending bidirectional programming for synchronizing data across data models;  language-based techniques for data curation and preservation, provenance tracking, or archiving; query and update techniques for longitudinal or provenance-aware queries.

One position is funded by a Microsoft Research PhD studentship, joint with Paul Anderson and Dimitrios Vytiniotis (MSR-Cambridge).  The funding includes a laptop for the student and there may be additional opportunities for collaboration or internships (at the discretion of MSR).  A second funded position may be available.

Applicants should have a good honors degree or equivalent in computer science, or a related discipline, and ideally familiarity with foundations of programming languages, security, or databases and interests in applications of these foundations to real systems.

Other PhD studentships are also available, including on topics related to types and programming languages.  Please contact me (jcheney@inf.ed.ac.uk) or others in LFCS to discuss alternative project ideas.

Read more »