[Job-offers-cs] Four postdoctoral positions available at the GSSI, L'Aquila (Italy)

[Pekka Orponen]

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: [DMANET] Four postdoctoral positions available at the GSSI, 
L'Aquila (Italy)
Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2019 17:09:00 +0200
From: Gianlorenzo D'Angelo <gianlorenzo.dangelo at gssi.it>
To: dmanet at zpr.uni-koeln.de

The Computer Science group at the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI, 
http://cs.gssi.it) --- an international PhD school and centre for 
advanced studies located in L'Aquila, Italy --- has four available 
postdoctoral positions. Three positions are in the context of three PRIN 
projects funded by the Italian Ministry for University and Research, namely

   - "ALGADIMAR: Algorithms, Games, and Digital Markets" (Gianlorenzo
      D’Angelo, PI at GSSI),

   - "Designing Spatially Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems under
      Uncertainty (SEDUCE)" (Catia Trubiani, PI at the GSSI) and

   - "IT MATTERS: Methods and Tools for Trustworthy Smart Systems" (Luca
      Aceto, PI at the GSSI).

The fourth position is financed by the GSSI and can be filled in any of 
the research themes within the group. See http://cs.gssi.it for more 
information on research areas in CS at GSSI. .

The positions are briefly described below. Each position is for two 
years and the salary is 36,000€ per year before taxes. All the positions 
are renewable for a third year, if this is mutually agreeable.

How to apply: The application must be submitted through the online form 
available at https://applications.gssi.it/postdoc/ by Thursday, 11 July 
2019 at 6 p.m. (Central European Time). For more information, please 
consult the Call for Applications at 
https://applications.gssi.it/postdoc/ or write an email to the PIs of 
the respective projects or to Luca Aceto.

Requirements: Candidates are expected to have a PhD degree in Computer 
Science or related disciplines. Preference will be given to applicants 
who have previous research experience on topics related to the themes of 
the projects.


Postdoctoral position financed by the GSSI

Scientific profile: The successful candidate will have a strong research 
record in one or more of the research areas within the Computer Science 
group at the GSSI, namely algorithms for modern networks, formal methods 
for reactive systems and model-based software engineering. We welcome 
applications in any of those areas.



Postdoctoral position within the project "ALGADIMAR: Algorithms, Games, 
and Digital Markets", supervised by Gianlorenzo D'Angelo:
http://www.gssi.it/people/professors/lectures-computer-science/item/456-d-angelo-gianlorenzo

Brief description of the project: Digital markets form an increasingly 
important component of the global economy. The Internet has enabled new 
markets with previously unknown features (e-commerce, web-based 
advertisement, viral marketing, sharing economy, real-time trading), and 
algorithms play a central role in many decision processes involved in 
these markets. For example, algorithms run electronic auctions, adjust 
prices dynamically, trade stocks, harvest big data to decide market 
strategies and to provide recommendations to customers.

The focus of the proposal ALGADIMAR is on the development of new methods 
and tools in research areas that are critical to the understanding of 
digital markets: algorithmic game theory, market and mechanism design, 
machine learning, algorithmic data analysis, optimization in strategic 
settings. We plan to apply these methods so as to solve fundamental 
algorithmic problems motivated by Internet advertisement, sharing 
economy, mechanism design for social good, security games. While our 
research is focused on foundational work —with rigorous design and 
analysis of algorithms, mechanisms and games— it will also include 
empirical validation on large-scale datasets from real-world applications.

Main activities: The research activity will be on one or more of the 
following topics: design and analysis of algorithms; algorithms and data 
structures for big data; approximation algorithms; combinatorial 
optimization; algorithms for graphs and networks; autonomous agents and 
mobile computing; distributed algorithms; algorithmic game theory, 
algorithmic aspects of internet and social networks.



Postdoctoral position within the project "Designing Spatially 
Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems under Uncertainty", supervised by 
Catia Trubiani: https://cs.gssi.it/catia.trubiani.

Brief description of the project: Emerging scenarios such as autonomous 
vehicles and the Internet-of-Things require large-scale cyber-physical 
systems(CPS), i.e., computing devices that interact with the physical 
world. To cope with their complexity, model-based design has long been 
advocated as a prominent approach for their rigorous development. 
However, the state of the art does not adequately account for two major 
issues: space, to capture the distribution of CPS devices as well as 
their mobility; and uncertainty, e.g., to reflect lack of knowledge 
about the environment, the accuracy of the model, or errors occurring in 
the real world. Our goal is to develop modelling and analysis techniques 
for CPS where space and uncertainty are first-class citizens. We 
envisage a component-based framework where digital and physical 
components have locality and mobility features, and where uncertainty is 
captured by means of probabilistically distributed activities to 
describe their dynamics. We devise a system to specify spatio-temporal 
CPS requirements, turning them into probabilistic spatio-temporal 
logical specifications that will be at the basis of efficient algorithms 
for the analysis, verification, and synthesis. We will apply our 
techniques to real case studies on smart buildings and crowd-navigating 
robots.

Main activities: The successful candidate will developa component-based 
modelling language for the specification of cyber physical systems, 
where digital components (i.e., the computational devices), need to 
co-exist with physical components (i.e., the dynamical models of the 
physical world). Each component will feature an appropriate location and 
mobility model. Uncertainty will be specified with either 
probabilistically distributed activities, or nondeterministically, 
leading to reasoning that will take into account worst- and best-case 
scenarios under any possible value of such uncertain actions. The 
modelling framework will allow the specification of spatio-temporal 
requirements, which establish the behavioural guarantees to be satisfied 
by the CPS under analysis.

The postdoctoral researcher will work with Catia Trubiani at the GSSI, 
and she/he will also collaborate with the project partners at IMT Lucca 
(Mirco Tribastone, coordinator of the project), University of Trieste 
(Luca Bortolussi and Stefano Seriani), and University of Camerino 
(Francesco Tiezzi).



Postdoctoral position within the project "IT MATTERS: Methods and Tools 
for Trustworthy Smart Systems" supervised by Luca Aceto: 
http://www.gssi.it/people/professors/lectures-computer-science/item/225-aceto-luca.

Brief description of the project: The goal of the project is the 
development and the application of a novel methodology for the 
specification, implementation and validation of trustworthy smart 
systems based on formal methods. We envisage system development in three 
steps by first providing and analysing system models to find design 
errors, then moving from models to executable code by translation into 
domain-specific programming languages and, finally, monitoring runtime 
execution to detect anomalous behaviours and to support systems in 
taking context-dependent decisions autonomously. Scientifically, the 
research will yield new, fundamental insights on the general properties 
of large scale, physically located, smart systems, leading to an 
end-to-end, principled approach to their design, implementation and 
deployment. The developed software tools and the work on the case 
studies will show the effectiveness of our proposed approach in three 
practical scenarios at different application scales.

Main activities: The successful candidate will develop runtime 
monitoring and software-model-checking techniques for “smart systems”, 
that is, systems that take context-dependent decisions autonomously. The 
research activities will involve developing frameworks that can deal 
with the distributed nature of smart systems and will   build on 
existing work on specification-based monitoring and software model 
checking of cyber-physical systems. The postdoctoral researcher will 
also devise techniques to use information derived from the runtime 
analysis to guide the software-model-checking effort and to refine the 
models of the runtime environment used in model checking.

The postdoctoral researcher will work with Luca Aceto, Omar Inverso, 
Ludovico Iovino and Emilio Tuosto at the GSSI. He/she will also 
collaborate with the project partners at IMT Lucca, CNR Pisa, University 
of Camerino, University of Pisa and University of Udine. Moreover, 
he/she will also interact with the concurrency group at ICE-TCS 
(http://icetcs.ru.is/), Reykjavik University, led by Luca Aceto and Anna 
Ingólfsdóttir.