Subject: PhD scholarship at INRIA, Nantes, France. 

INRIA invites applications for a Ph.D. research position on the topic of uncertain data management, in the ATLAS team, Nantes, France. See http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/lina/ATLAS for a description of the team. French is NOT mandatory in ATLAS as the working languages are English or French.

Thesis Description: 
The objective of the PhD thesis is to introduce data uncertainty in Community Information Systems (CISs) and design a query processing service which deals effectively with uncertain data. We assume a CIS based on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architecture such as APPA which we are developing. The main tasks to be carried out in the thesis are: 1) Define a data model and query language which support data uncertainty in CISs.  This task can capitalize on the recent work on probabilistic databases and should come up with an algebra as a basis for query processing; 2) Design a P2P query processing service which supports the proposed data model and query language. This service will support query decomposition, routing (to the peers holding relevant data), execution using local DBMS, and result aggregation. This task will capitalize on our work on P2P top-k query processing; 3) Validate the proposed service by an implementation in the APPA prototype on the GRID5000 and PlanetLab platforms and perform significant experiments on real and synthetic benchmarks representative of CIS applications. 

Requirements: 
Candidates are expected to possess a master degree in computer science, or related fields. The successful applicant should have strong background in mathematics (particularly probability theory), algorithms, database, and distributed systems. 

Location: 
The thesis will be done in the ATLAS team, which is located in Nantes, France (2 hours from Paris by fast train). Nantes is a major center of the European West and the sixth largest city in France. It is located on the Loire Estuary and 50km from the Atlantic coast, and is famous for enjoying an exceptional quality of life. It is also an academic city which involves more than 32,000 students, 200 research laboratories, and 2200 researchers. 

More details on this PhD position as well as the procedure for application submission can be seen at: 
http://www.talentsplace.com/syndication1/inria/ukdoc/details.html?id=PNGFK026203F3VBQB6G68LOE1&LOV5=4509&LOV6=4514&LG=EN&Resultsperpage=20&nPostingID=2201&nPostingTargetID=5409&option=52&sort=DESC&nDepartmentID=28 

If you have any questions, please contact Prof. Patrick Valduriez at: 
Patrick.Valduriez@inria.fr.