With its branches at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, (11 scholarship holders), the Technion in Haifa, Israel (11 scholarship holders), and the Nanjing University in China (7 scholarship holders) the Potsdam Graduate School has dedicated itself to the field of "Service-Oriented Systems Engineering". Scholars investigate the current overarching questions from different perspectives in their own research areas. This model, introduced at HPI in 2005, calls for junior researchers to be jointly mentored by their professors rather than only on an individual basis.

Successful Research School Alumni at Google, Microsoft or IBM 

"Each of our PhD candidates consequently also learns the questions, theoretical models and practical approaches of other disciplines", said HPI director Prof. Christoph Meinel describing the significant advantage. This facilitates a mutual understanding of content and supports fruitful collaborative work with other scientists and specialists. That the model of the International Research Training Group is successful proves not least the large number of Research School alumni who work successfully with major IT corporations such as Google, Microsoft, and IBM. Since the founding of the Research School ten years ago, there are 50 completed doctorates. 21 in Potsdam, 13 at the Technion in Israel, nine at the University of Cape Town and seven in China at Nanjing University.

A broad range of research topics

The Research School, "Service Oriented Systems Engineering", focuses on – to put it very simply – service programs to facilitate a standardized form for the exchange of loosely coupled programs and data. Such programs are increasingly superseding the intermeshed software applications and processes used up to now. "In case of reconfiguration, this allows for the flexibility to make changes and saves the needs for basic, expensive reprogramming", said Prof. Andreas Polze, spokesman of the Research School.

The work of the PhD students at the HPI Research School involves research questions on architecture, modeling and the security engineering of service-oriented systems. Additional areas address fundamental issues such as: the self-adaptive administration of services at the operating system level, questions concerning the application of services in the fields of adaptive process management, service composition and process design. 3D computer graphics, geoinformatics, and human computer interaction are further challenging service-oriented system application topics investigated at the HPI Research School.