RA vacancy

[jd1]

UNIVERSITY OF KENT AT CANTERBURY
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POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATE IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
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Applications are invited for a 3 year EPSRC Postdoctoral Research
Associateship to join an established research group investigating the
specification and design of distributed systems. Funding has
been obtained from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research
Council for a project entitled "Design Support Environments for
Distributed Systems"

The project builds upon the success of a previous British Telecom
funded project at UKC: "Permabase", which automated performance
prediction into the design process and in which UML was used to capture
aspects of the system design.

In this project we aim to extend facilities for the design of multimedia
distributed systems, to ensure that they can effectively meet the needs of
complex systems which include the use of stream communication,
multicasting and Quality of Service (QoS) constraints.
In particular, we aim to:

1) Augment UML to provide explicit support for distributed systems design,
including provision for the use of stream communication, multicasting and
QoS specification.

2) Develop techniques to check consistency of UML behavioural diagrams.

3) Enhance existing techniques to produce verification of performance
and QoS properties from designs.

4) Perform several demanding case studies.

A suitable candidate will have completed or will soon complete a
PhD and will be expected to show excellent potential in research.

There are a number of themes to this work, and an ideal candidate will have a
will have expertise in one or more of the following areas:

- distributed systems (e.g. Open Distributed Processing)
- UML and other design techniques
- formal methods or design languages such as OCL
- network or system performance
- tool development

The position is available from October and is a fixed term appointment for
3 years.

Salary within the range 16,655-19,197 pounds. Application forms and
further particulars are available from The Personnel Office, The Registry,
The University, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, Telephone (and Minicom) (01227)
823674 or email request to pers...@ukc.ac.uk or (01227) 827837 (24 hour
answerphone). Please quote Reference Number A99/96.

The closing date for applications is 30 July 1999.

Informal enquires can be directed to either Gill Waters (A.G.W...@ukc.ac.uk)
or John Derrick (J.De...@ukc.ac.uk). Further details of the Computer Science
Department are at http://www.cs.ukc.ac.uk/ where details of the vacancy can
also be found.