Potsdam. The Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) admits ten new junior researchers to its international “Research School”. Starting in the upcoming winter term they can join the Potsdam-based graduate school, a team of around 30 altogether. Suitable candidates who are planning a PhD or hold one already are invited to apply. The monthly scholarships range from 1,450 to 1,850 euros. Applications are accepted at the HPI Research School by August 1, 2011.
The HPI Research School with its “branches” at the University of Cape Town, South Africa (six researchers), and at Technion in Haifa, Israel (ten researchers), focuses on “Service-Oriented Systems Engineering”. The scholarship holders look at this common topic from the different angles of their individual disciplinary backgrounds. The model was initiated in 2005 and provides that each of the young academics will be coached by all professors rather than just one supervisor.
"This enables each of our PhD students to get to know the problems, the specific ways of thinking, and the approaches of the other disciplines", HPI Director Prof. Christoph Meinel explains, pointing out one of the fundamental advantages. Furthermore it supports content-based communication and fruitful collaboration with other researchers and experts.
The Research School’s emphasis, ”Service-Oriented Systems Engineering”, to put it simply, deals with loosely interlinked service programs that exchange data in a standardized way. They are gradually replacing previous software applications and processes which were closely interconnected. “Therefore, we can respond to changes with a flexible reconfiguration. This prevents essential and expensive reprogramming”, emphasizes Prof. Andreas Polze, coordinator of the Research School.
The HPI Research School scholarship holders will for example work on scientific questions about architectures, modeling, and security engineering of service-oriented systems. Furthermore, they will engage with basic principles such as the self-adaptive management of services on the OS level or with questions on the use of services in the fields of process management, services composition, and workflow planning. The areas of 3D computer graphics, geoinformatics, and human-computer interaction offer an interesting range of application for the work on service-orientated systems, and are also part of the research scope at the HPI Research School.
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