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======================================================================== !!!!!!!!! URGENT: Submission Deadline: March 16th, 2011 !!!!!!!!!!!! Last call for one PhD position in ICT on "Satisfiability-based algorithms for Requirements Engineering" at Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Trento, Italy. Advisors: Prof. John Mylopoulos and Prof. Roberto Sebastiani ======================================================================== ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA: Candidates are required to have a master -- or equivalent -- degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or Mathematics, or to obtain it withing November 1st 2011. The ideal candidates should have a good background in logic and in software engineering. A background knowledge in Propositional Satisfiability (SAT), Satisfiablity Modulo Theory (SMT), Automated Reasoning, Knowledge Representation & Reasoning or Formal Methods would be very-positively evaluated. All the positions are covered by a scholarship, amounting roughly to 51,000 Euros over the three years. Substantial extra funding is available for participation in international conferences, schools, and workshops. DESCRIPTION: Over the past decade, logic-based goal-oriented requirements modeling languages have been used in Computer Science in order to represent software requirements, business objectives and design qualities. Such models extend traditional AI planning techniques for representing goals by allowing for partially defined and possibly inconsistent goals. In past work by the proposers, a framework for reasoning with such goal models have been proposed. The goal af the PhD project is to investigate and implement novel automated reasoning procedures --or to adapt existing ones-- for efficiently solving requirements problems expressed as goal models, for optimizing the solutions according to required criteria and, since requirements evolve with time, to minimize the effort of finding new solutions and maximizing the reuse of old solutions. In particular, a significant effort will be devoted to investigate and adapt SAT- and SMT-based algorithms for finding optimal solutions to parameterized goal models. INFORMAL ENQUIRIES ARE ENCOURAGED. Please get in touch with Roberto Sebastiani (rs...@disi.unitn.it, +39.0461.281514) as soon as possible, in order to have a better understanding of possible research activities and the formal application details. HOW TO APPLY: The positions are included in the "Project Specific Grants - DISI" of the ICT International Doctoral School, University of Trento, as reported in the official call published at http://ict.unitn.it/application. You must submit a formal application (by March 16 2011 !) to the ICT School (http://ict.unitn.it/). In the application, you must mandatorily quote the "Project-specific Grants - DISI" grant: "Ontologies and algorithms for requirements engineering" since failure to do so may result in ineligibility for this position. Closing date for applications (sharp!) is March 16th, 2011, 1 pm, local time. Thus, potentially-interested candidates must: - URGENTLY (by March 16 2011 !!) submit a formal application to the ICT School (http://ict.unitn.it/). - send their CV (and later three recommendation letters) to Roberto Sebastiani (rs...@disi.unitn.it) cc-ing Michela Angeli (ang...@disi.unitn.it), and FUNDING: The position is funded by the project “Lucretius: Foundations for Software Evolution", thanks to an ERC (European Research Council) advanced grant awarded to Prof. John Mylopoulos (2011-2016). The positions is within the Software Engineering and Formal Methods group, Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (http://www.disi.unitn.it) and the ICT Doctoral School of the Department (http://ict.unitn.it) of the University of Trento, Trento, Italy.