PhD Position in Utrecht University, Faculty of Science

Job Description: In general, programs perform analysis on user input in order to generate output tailored to user needs. In particular, compilers perform program analyses to check for correctness, provide good feedback on programming errors, and improve performance of generated programs. Such analyses are costly to perform, and at the same time, must often be done in short periods of time, for example because of its use in an interactive editing environment. Extensive analyses and fast execution of such analyses thus are two conflicting requirements.

The project aims to remedy the conflict between the desire to use program analyses and the desire to execute such analyses with sufficiently good performance; the project intends to exploit incrementality to achieve good performance for otherwise time consuming analyses. An incremental program reuses the results of a previous computation to speedily recompute a result when a small change in input is given to the program. The research problem arises because manually rewriting existing non-incremental solutions to an incremental version of the solution often is errorprone and difficult. The project will investigate the automatic generation of incremental programs from non-incremental programs, in particular for compilers and the program analyses which are done as part of the compilation process. The research will take place in the context of the Utrecht Haskell compiler (UHC) and the tools used to construct this compiler, in particular the UUAG Attribute Grammar system.

This project is funded by a research grant from the Netherlands ‘Organization for Scientific Research’ (NWO).

Requirements: We seek a highly motivated candidate holding a Master’s degree in computer science, with experience and interest in the area of programming language design, functional programming (in particular Haskell), and program analysis. Candidates are expected to have an independent working style and a good knowledge of English, which is an absolute must.
Conditions of employment

The candidate is offered a full time position for 4 years. The salary is supplemented with a holiday bonus of 8% and an end-of-year bonus of 8,3% per year. In addition we offer: a pension scheme, a partially paid parental leave, flexible employment conditions. Conditions are based on the Collective Labour Agreement Dutch Universities. The research group will provide the candidate with necessary support on all aspects of the project

Application Closing Date: 6 October 2010

Further Scholarship Information and Application

Tags: Computer Science, Netherlands, PhD position