[TYPES/announce] PhD Position at INRIA Grenoble, France

[Pierre Geneves]

The WAM research project at INRIA Grenoble Rhone-Alpes invites 
applications for one PhD position on developing an XQuery Programming 
Environment for the mobile devices.

-- Theme --

In the recent years, huge amounts of information from various
application domains are stored, exchanged, and presented using XML.
In this context, the ability to safely, efficiently and uniformly
query XML data on different platforms such as mobile devices on a
variety of data sources becomes increasingly important. XQuery is the 
W3C standard for querying XML data. It is increasingly popular and one 
of the challenges in web software development today is to help achieving 
a good level of quality in terms of programming frameworks, code size 
and runtime performance.  In particular, with the recent advances in 
document formats such as the advent of HTML5, SVG and other UI oriented 
formats together with the increasing interaction between browsers and 
remote services, a general purpose, uniform and reliable alternative to 
JavaScript can be played with languages such as XQuery.

-- Topic --

The topic of this PhD thesis consists in designing and implementing a 
programming environment for XQuery that can offer the following features:
  - A type inference system for XQuery
  - A Static type checker for XQuery
  - Automatic code optimization and dead-code analysis

Based on these features, other applications can be built to offer
security features for data manipulation such as path-based access 
control policies.

On the theoretical side, the proposed work consists in extending an
existing logical framework for XML reasoning to the modeling and 
reasoning on node sequences. The foundations are based on newly 
developed formal programming language verification techniques [1,2], 
which are now mature enough to be introduced in the context of software 
development.

The WAM project seeks to establish logical foundations and automated
reasoning techniques with applications concerning, but not limited to,
static analysis of programs manipulating XML documents, pointer and heap
analysis, program verification. Information about previous relevant
research is available online:
     http://wam.inrialpes.fr/web-solver/webinterface.html


-- Required Skills --

Applicants should have interests in programming languages, type theory, 
and/or mathematical logic, with a concern in the intersection of theory 
and practice. Expertise in the following areas are particularly welcomed:
  - programming language and type theory
  - program analysis
  - formal methods
  - automated reasoning


-- References --

  [1] Efficient Static Analysis of XML Paths and Types.
      Pierre Geneves, Nabil Layaida and Alan Schmitt. PLDI'07.
  [2] Impact of XML Schema Evolution.
      Pierre Geneves, Nabil Layaida and Vincent Quint. TOIT'11.
  [3] XQuery in the browser.
      Ghislain Fourny, Donald Kossmann, Tim Kraska, Markus Pilman,
      and Daniela Florescu. SIGMOD '08.


-- Keywords --

XQuery, static analysis, type system, security, mobile computing


-- How to apply --

Please submit your application through the link below:

http://www.inria.fr/institut/recrutement-metiers/offres/theses/campagne-2011/%28view%29/details.html?id=PGTFK026203F3VBQB6G68LONZ&LOV5=4509&LG=FR&Resultsperpage=20&nPostingID=5115&nPostingTargetID=10138&option=52&sort=DESC&nDepartmentID=28




________________________________________________
       Pierre Geneves
       www.pierresoft.com/pierre.geneves