Vacant Postdoc position in Computer Systems

Application deadline: 27 November 2015

Applications shall be marked: Ref. 2015/1723

The Department of Computer Science at University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway (UiT) has a Postdoctoral Research Fellow position vacant.

The position of Postdoctoral Research Fellow is a fixed term position for a period of three years. The primary objective of the appointment is for the research fellow to qualify for work in senior academic positions. No one may be appointed to more than one fixed term period as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the same institution.

Further information about the position is available by contacting Head of Department Alexander Horsch, phone +47 7764 6735, e-mail: alexander.horsch@uit.no.

For administrative questions, please contact the Department’s administration:
phone +47 77 64 40 36, email: administrasjon@cs.uit.no.

The position’s affiliation

UiT is the largest research university in northern Norway with about 11,800 students and 2,900 employees. UiT is a founding member of the University of the Arctic, an international network of study and research institutions of the circumpolar region. Two hundred international agreements secure an active academic exchange of students and staff with partner institutions worldwide.

The Department of Computer Science provides a strong international research environment with 12 tenured faculty members, 6 adjunct professors, 3 post doctors and researchers, 6 technical/ administrative staff members and about 20 PhD students. The goal of the Department is to advance the research and teaching of computer science as a discipline, to demonstrate leadership within our areas of interest, and to contribute to society through our education, research and dissemination. More information available athttp://uit.no/informatikk/.

The position’s field of work

Research at the Department of Computer Science is both systems-level software research and systems-level software development. We are concerned primarily with technical aspects of computer science systems research of mobile, distributed and/or parallel systems and applications. The research covers experimental development, application, analysis and testing of models, architectures, and mechanisms for mobile, embedded, distributed and/or parallel applications. Scaling, performance, handling of large feature-rich datasets, heterogeneity, energy-efficiency, autonomy, and componentization are examples of concerns that we address. Application areas include high-performance computing, green computing, visualization, genomics, information search and filtering, health and health-care related systems. Research platforms include clusters, grids, display walls, mobile systems, embedded systems and cloud systems.

Researchers are organized in five voluntary research groups, each with one leader

The postdoctoral research fellow will have a primary supervisor among the department’s regular full-time faculty (Prof. or Assoc. Prof.), and will work within one or more of the department’s research groups. Depending on the specifics of the work, additional co-supervisors may be appointed internally or externally to the department.

The Arctic Green Computing (AGC) research group (https://site.uit.no/arcticgreen/) aims at addressing energy efficiency, system complexity and dependability across mobile, embedded and data-center systems. The group current research topics include novel execution models forming foundations for a paradigm shift from energy “blind” to energy “aware” software development, and energy-aware network routing and security protocols in wireless sensor networks and cyber-physical systems. The group is a work-package leader in EU FP7 ICT project EXCESS on energy-efficient high-performance computing systems (2013 – 2016) and the project leader of Norwegian FRIPRO project PREAPP on programming productivity and energy efficiency (2014 – 2017). The group is also the Norwegian representative in the management committee of the EU COST Action Euro-TM on concurrent programming abstractions (2011 – 2015) and a member of EU network of excellence HiPEAC on high performance and embedded architecture and compilation.

The High Performance Distributed and Parallel Systems group (hpds.cs.uit.no, bdps.cs.uit.no) does systems research on distributed and parallel systems. Topics of interest to the group includes scalable concurrency, composition of parallel programs, visualization and analytics of big data, systems support for multi-computer human-computer interfaces, and collaborative systems and cross-platform resource sharing. In bioinformatics we are primarily interested in improving the scalability and interactivity of bioinformatics analysis methods and frameworks. The HPDS group applies several methods and techniques including machine learning, interactive big data analytics, visual big data analytics, and advanced statistical and mathematical models. The group develops extensive prototypes, and does performance measuring experiments on them with the purpose of documenting their characteristics and understanding their scalability and applicability. The group has several cross-disciplinary projects nationally and internationally including on meteorology, bioinformatics, and medicine. The group has two laboratories, the Tromsø Display Wall Laboratory, and the Biological Data Processing Systems Laboratory.

The Information Access (IA) research group focus on fundamental system structures and concepts related to the construction of scalable, fault-tolerant, and secure cloud-based information-access services. The group undertakes high-impact interdisciplinary research and innovation at the intersection of computer science, sport science, and medicine. The group is particularly focused on technology innovations in the convergence space of mobility, social networking, multimedia, cloud computing, big medical data, machine learning, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The IA group is a key partner of the Corpore Sano Centre.

The Medical Informatics and Telemedicine group (MI&T) studies technical computer science issues within the broader area of health informatics, including mobile phone-based social media applications and serious computer games for people with chronic diseases, self-help systems for people with chronic diseases, electronic disease surveillance, medical sensor systems, context-sensitive communication in hospitals, advanced videoconference-based telemedicine systems, patient modeling, telemedicine systems in homes and telemedicine services in remote areas. All projects are done in cooperation with, or closely connected to, Tromsø Telemedicine Laboratory and Norwegian Centre for Integrated Care and Telemedicine,University Hospital of North Norway.

The research in the Open distributed systems (ODS) group is centered around middleware that facilitates the construction of applications of various kinds, with an emphasis on interoperability and adaptability issues. The group focuses on support for next-generation distributed applications, mobility, composition-based web applications, real-time collaboration and information exchange. Specific issues include adaptability, context-awareness, personalization, semantic-based image management, applied security, services orchestration, collaborative editing, consistency and reliability. Recent activities have included secure multiparty computation of health data, mobile business infrastructures, and personalized information access.

A more extensive description of our research groups is available at:

http://uit.no/informatikk/forskning/.

Qualification requirements

The successful candidate will have a publication record reflecting solid knowledge in computer science, and documented skills on experimental computer science research. We are looking for candidates who have demonstrated increased scientific maturity regarding their selection of research topics, application of methods, and dissemination of results. Research results must be backed by thorough experiments and analyses. Applicants without a documented background in experimental computer science research will not be considered for appointment. Applications found by the assessment committee to be within theory of computation or information science will not be considered either.

For appointment as Postdoctoral Fellow, the applicant requires:

• Norwegian doctoral degree in the subject area concerned or a corresponding foreign doctoral degree recognized as equivalent to a Norwegian doctoral degree.

When applying for a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, the applicant shall submit a project proposal for the qualifying work. This proposal shall include a progress plan. It is required that the applicant will be able to complete the project during the period of appointment. Before appointment the successful applicant and the department must agree on a primary supervisor for the project. Additional co-supervisors will be decided only after the appointment.

Emphasis shall be attached to personal suitability.

Working conditions

The working hours shall primarily be utilized for research, research-related activities and research administration. The research fellow is expected to participate professionally within the department with occasional advice of students; presentations for faculty and students, laboratory assignments etc., totaling up to 20 % of the position. The position will not include regular teaching assignments.

The successful applicant must be willing to engage himself/herself in the ongoing development of computer science as a discipline, the department, and of the university as a whole.

The remuneration for this position is in accordance with the State salary scale code 1352.

A compulsory contribution of 2 % to the Norwegian Public Service Pension Fund will be deducted.

Assessment

An expert committee will assess the applicants. The committee’s mandate is to undertake an assessment of the applicants’ qualifications based on the material presented by the applicants, and the detailed description drawn up for the position.

The applicants who are assessed as the best qualified might be called to an interview. The interview shall among other things aim to clarify the applicant’s personal suitability for the position. A trial lecture may also be held.

UiT wishes to increase the proportion of females in research positions. In the event that two or more applicants are found to be approximately equally qualified, female applicants will be given priority.

Application

The application must be submitted electronically via the application form available on this page and shall include:

• Letter of application
• CV (containing a complete overview of education, supervised professional training and professional work)
• Diplomas
• Names and e-mail address of references
• Form for documentation of teaching qualifications (see page with Information for applicants for positions at UiT)
• List of works and description of these, containing the following information:
  • author(s), the work’s title
  • for articles: the journal’s name and volume, the first and last page of the article, year of publication
  • for publications: publisher, printer, year of publication, number of pages
• Academic works:The applicant should submit up to ten works that are central to his/her production. The applicant’s doctoral thesis is regarded in this context as one work.
• In addition, the applicant shall provide a description of his/her production stating which works he/she considers the most important and which shall therefore be the main emphasis of the assessment. A brief description of the other listed works shall also be included to demonstrate depth of production. These descriptions shall be an attachment to the application.

All documentation that is to be evaluated must be translated into English or a Scandinavian language.

Applicants shall also refer to the supplementary regulations for appointment to postdoktor (postdoctoal Research Fellow), stipendiat (PhD) and vitenskapelige assistent (Research Assistant) positions at the UiTand to the Regulations concerning terms and conditions of employment for posts of postdoktor (Postdoctoral Research Fellow), stipendiat (PhD), vitenskapelig assistent (Research Assistant) and spesialistkandidat (Resident).

Questions concerning the organisation of the working environment, such as the physical state of the place of employment, health service, possibility for flexible working hours, part time, etc. may be directed to the telephone reference in this announcement.

UiT has HR policy objectives that emphasize diversity, and therefore encourages qualified applicants to apply regardless of their age, gender, functional ability and national or ethnic background.

The university is an IW (Inclusive Workplace) enterprise, and will therefore emphasize making the necessary adaptations to the working conditions for employees with reduced functional ability.

Personal data given in an application or CV will be processed in accordance with the Act relating to the processing of personal data (the Personal Data Act). In accordance with Section 25 subsection 2 of the Freedom of Information Act, the applicant may request not to be registered on the public list of applicants. However, the University may nevertheless decide that the name of the applicant will be made public. The applicant will receive advance notification in the event of such publication.