[ecoop-info] 2 postdoctoral positions available at INRIA Lille - Nord Europe (France)

[Romain Rouvoy]

Apologizes for multiple receptions of this announcement.

The group of Adaptive Distributed Applications & Middleware (ADAM http://adam.lille.inria.fr 
) at the INRIA Lille - Nord Europe (http://www.inria.fr/lille) is  
announcing two postdoctoral positions in the area of component models  
for dependable adaptations:
1- Towards a Formal Theory of Component Models
2- Self-Organizing Large-Scale Adaptations


End of the campaign : June 19, 2009
Beginning of the positions: from September to December 2009



CONTEXT

INRIA, the national institute for research in computer science and  
control, is dedicated to fundamental and applied research in  
information and communication science and technology (ICST).  
Throughout its eight research centres located in seven major regions  
(Aquitaine, Bretagne, Lorraine, Ile-de-France, Nord Pas-de-Calais,  
Provence Alpes Cote d'Azur, Rhone-Alpes), the Institute has a  
workforce of 3,700, 2,900 of whom are scientists from INRIA and its  
partner organizations. INRIA has an annual budget of 162 million  
euros, 20% of which comes from its own research contracts and  
development products. INRIA develops many partnerships with industry  
and fosters technology transfer and company foundations in the field  
of ICST - some eighty companies have been funded. Startups are  
financed in particular by INRIA Transfert, a subsidiary of INRIA that  
supports four startup funds. The international collaborations are  
based on an incentive strategy of welcoming and recruiting foreign  
students as well as developing strong exchanges between research  
scientists. Priority is given to geographic zones with strong growth:  
Europe, Asia and North America while maintaining reasonable  
cooperation with South America, Africa and Middle-East.

ADAM (http://adam.lille.inria.fr) is a project-team of the INRIA Lille  
- Nord Europe research center (http://www.inria.fr/lille). Members of  
the ADAM project-team are also part of the LIFL (Laboratoire  
d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille) which is a joint unit between  
CNRS and the University of Lille 1. The objective of the ADAM  
(Adaptive Distributed Applications and Middleware) project-team is to  
provide a set of concepts, paradigms, approaches, frameworks, and  
tools based on advanced software engineering techniques such as CBSE  
(Component-Based Software Engineering), AOSD (Aspect-Oriented Software  
Development) or CAC (Context-Aware Computing) to build distributed  
adaptive software systems (applications and middleware) involving in  
multi-scale environments and to take into account the adaptation all  
along the software life-cycle. The ADAM project-team proposes  
solutions to manage the evolution of application requirements in terms  
of functional and extra-functional properties either at the level of  
execution platforms or at the design level. The ADAM project-team  
applies them to component-based and service-oriented computing  
distributed applications and platforms.




TOPIC N.1: Towards a Formal Theory of Component Models (contact:  
Philippe Merle <philippe.merle at inria.fr>)

Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) is a world-wide and well- 
known approach to build configurable and dynamically adaptable  
software systems. However, there exits a plethora of component models  
as UML and CCM from OMG, SCA from OASIS, COM/COM+/DCOM/ .NET from  
Microsoft, JavaBeans/EJB/JMX/JBI from Sun Microsystems, OSGi, the  
Spring Framework, and a lot of other industrial or academic models.  
Component models are strongly heterogeneous as each can target a  
distinct domain of applications and provides specific extra functional  
properties to applications. For instance, SCA provides a component  
model for integration in Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), EJB  
focuses on secure and transactional enterprise information systems,  
OpenCom is a generic component model for building systems software, or  
Fractal is a general-purpose lightweight reflective component model  
applying to systems-on-chip, operating systems, middleware,  
application servers, and grid computing. For a same extra functional  
property, component models can provide different behavioral semantics,  
e.g., OSGi and Fractal provide different (perhaps incompatible)  
semantics for the life cycle of components. However, complex software  
systems are often built as composition of heterogeneous sub-systems,  
each built on top of one component model. Then, there is a strong  
requirement to address the composition and interoperability of  
heterogeneous component models. This encompasses the composition of  
heterogeneous 1) component-oriented notions (e.g., binding OpenCom  
receptacles to SCA services) and 2) extra functional behavioral  
semantics (e.g., unifying the life cycle of OSGi and Fractal).

To address the composition and interoperability of heterogeneous  
component models, we propose to rigorously 1) formalize component  
models as mathematical structures, 2) capture common foundations  
between component models, and 3) compare them in order to identify  
their equivalences, intersections, complementarities, and differences.  
At the end, this research must allow us to build a mathematical theory  
explaining and classifying the notions and semantics of component  
models formally. The work program for the proposed post-doctoral  
position is:
   1. Selection of component models to formalize. As there is a  
plethora of component models, the first activity is to select the  
component models to formalize in next steps. We have a strong interest  
for the Fractal, OpenCom, SCA, JBI, and OSGi component models but  
other can be also considered.
   2. Formalization of selected component models. This second step  
consists in the formalization of component models selected in step 1.  
We strongly encourage using the first-order relational logic and the  
Alloy formal specification language as formal method and tool  
respectively.
   3. Consolidation of common formal foundations. We recently defined  
a formal specification of the Fractal component model with Alloy. This  
specification proposes some common foundations to build component  
models. This third step consists to consolidate and enhance these  
common foundations based on feedbacks from work done in step 2.
   4. Definition of a formal aspect-oriented architectural definition  
language. The expected formal ADL should put at work the composition  
and interoperability between heterogeneous component models by  
allowing 1) the composition of heterogeneous components in order to  
select the most appropriate model for each component, and 2) the  
composition of its own/new component model by weaving concerns coming  
from different component models.




TOPIC N.2: Self-Organizing Large-Scale Adaptations (contact: Romain  
Rouvoy <romain.rouvoy at inria.fr>)

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) provide a versatile paradigm for  
building large-scale distributed systems. These systems are generally  
composed from legacy services published in different domains. However,  
the variability of the respective hosting infrastructures requires the  
SOA to be continuously adapted in order to keep satisfying the end- 
users. As a consequence, the growing complexity of these systems  
deployed in large-scale environments brings new research challenges in  
terms of collection, dissemination, and application of distributed  
adaptations. Indeed, the existing approaches for performing SOA  
adaptations do not scale and thus only provide limited solutions to  
the adaptation of large-scale systems. In particular, current  
approaches to self-adaptation need to be revisited to provide much  
more flexibility in the way adaptation domains are defined. Adaptation  
domains control the scope and the visibility of the adaptations that  
are performed within the domain. However, current approaches define  
their adaptation domain based on static criteria (e.g., network  
partition, application partition), thus leading inevitably to  
inefficient adaptations on the long term.

Therefore, the objective of this postdoc is to propose and implement a  
middleware solution supporting the organization,  
collection,dissemination, and application of large-scale adaptations.  
This includes i) the definition of adaptation domains, ii) the  
deployment of context information collectors, iii) the dissemination  
of contextual situations collected in the domain, and iv) the  
dissemination of adaptation decisions within the adaptation domain. To  
achieve this objective, we are particularly interested in combining  
the principles of fuzzy logic and group communication systems. In  
particular, we believe that the combination of these approaches can  
provide a flexible solution to the definition of adaptation domains by  
using the concept of fuzzy group, which can dynamically shrink,  
expand, split, or merge depending on ad hoc criteria.

The work to realize during this thesis will be organized as follows:
	- Studying the state-of-the-art in the domain of large-scale  
adaptations. The study will particularly focus on the organization and  
scalability of the related works in this domain;
	- Propose a comprehensive model for the self-organization of  
distributed adaptations. In particular, it will identify the key  
criteria for organizing the self-adaptation of large-scale systems.  
This model will also exhibit autonomous capabilities and will not rely  
on any centralized infrastructure or knowledge;
	- Implement a middleware solution enabling the self-organization of  
distributed adaptations based on the proposed model. This distributed  
middleware will dynamically control the partition of adaptation  
domains and assign responsibility to nodes within each adaptation  
domain;
	- Validate the proposed solution on large-scale adaptation scenario.  
The target infrastructure for demonstrating the results will be a grid  
or ubiquitous environment.

More information at: http://www.lifl.fr/~rouvoy/topics/postdoc-cappucino-09.html




APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS
Applicant should have held a doctorate or Ph.D. for less than one year  
or you are about to obtain one and you would like to carry out a  
fulfilling research activity in the field of ICST (information and
communication science and technology) or in a related field.

POSITION SALARY
2,357.30 EUR gross per month

SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFITS
- Entitled to unemployment benefit at the end of the contract;
- Affiliated to the French social security system.

HOW TO APPLY
Thank you for applying directly on the institute's website, by  
following this link: http://www.inria.fr/travailler/opportunites/postdoc/postdoc.en.html