Service-Oriented Applications (SOA) Research Group Fondazione Bruno Kessler Trento, Italy
The Service Oriented Applications (SOA) Research Group, part of the Center for Information Technology (IRST) of the Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento, Italy, is seeking candidates for the two following PhD positions:
Internet of Services
Internet of Service (IoS) is a novel and promising research line that is gaining more and more interest among the research community and whose enormous potential has been clearly recognized by the industry. The main challenge of IoS is to give to billions of interested users a transparent, seamless, and trustworthy access to the millions of services available on the Web and on mobile phones. This problem cannot be handled by simply extending existing serviced-oriented approaches, since it requires a paradigm shift from software services to real world services, from application-centered services to user-centered services, from Intranet to Internet.
The research effort will be to investigate novel approaches to service composition, centered on the user, her activities and her goals, providing methodologies and techniques to develop services that will be able to be composed, contextualized and customized to any situation and user’s needs. The PhD program will take place at SOA, the Service Oriented Applications research unit within Fondazione Bruno Kessler.
Adaptation and Evolution of Service-based Applications
FBK assigns a PhD Scholarship Grant for carrying out research on adaptation and evolution of service-based applications (SBA). The research effort focuses on two specific topics: automatic adaptation of service-based applications as a reaction to new business needs, QoS violations, context changes; evolution of the SBA learning from the adaptation and execution history, using success cases as patterns for evolution mechanisms.
The PhD program will take place at SOA, the Service Oriented Applications research unit within Fondazione Bruno Kessler.
The SOA Research Group
Led by Marco Pistore, the Service Oriented Applications Research Group (http://soa.fbk.eu) consists of about 15 persons, including researchers, Ph.D., post-Doc, and programmers, doing research in the field of service oriented computing, web services, and distributed business processes.
The research of the group focuses in particular on the development of techniques and tools that enact the effective, reliable, low-cost, and time-efficient composition and monitoring of distributed business processes through web service technologies. The pioneering research performed by the SOA group in this area is widely recognized to be state of-the- art for what concerns advanced methodologies and automated support tools for the design and execution of distributed web processes.
Such results are embedded within the ASTRO platform, which includes and integrates tools for service composition, verification, execution, and monitoring. Current research directions of the unit include user centric service composition (i.e., the composition and enactment of available services to fulfill specific requirements of the end-user) and evolution and adaptation of service compositions through autonomic mechanisms.
The group is currently involved in several research projects, as well as in industrial projects aiming at applying the research results of the group to key application domains such as Telco, e-government, and logistics.
Location
Trento is a lively town of about 100.000 inhabitants, located about 130 km south of the border between Italy and Austria. It is well known for the beauty of its mountains and lakes, and it offers the possibility to practice a wide range of sports. Trento enjoys a rich cultural and historical heritage, and it is the ideal starting point for day trips to famous towns such as Venice or Verona, as well as to enjoy great naturalistic journeys.
