[Om-announce] Research Assistantship at Oxford on Bidirectional Transformations

[Jeremy.Gibbons at cs.ox.ac.uk]

Postdoctoral Research Assistant 
"A THEORY OF LEAST-CHANGE FOR BIDIRECTIONAL TRANSFORMATIONS"
Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford

Applications are invited for a Research Fellowship on an EPSRC-funded project "A Theory of Least-Change for Bidirectional Transformations". The project is a collaboration between Professor Jeremy Gibbons in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, and Dr Perdita Stevens and Dr James Cheney in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. 

The project concerns bidirectional transformations, which are a means of maintaining consistency between multiple information sources: when one source is edited, the others may need updating to restore consistency. There are applications in model-driven engineering, database design, and program development, among others.  A bidirectional transformation can be implemented in terms of several unidirectional restoring functions, one per source; but this duplicates information, wasting effort and risking inconsistencies. Bidirectional transformation languages allow one to describe the consistency relationship and the restoring functions with a single declarative specification.

Our aim in this project is to study the principle of least change: that a bidirectional transformation should not make unnecessary or unnecessarily large changes when it re-establishes consistency. The primary focus of the Oxford contribution is the development of a theory of alignment for bidirectional transformations on structured data, especially in the case of non-free datatypes such as associative lists and graphs. We conjecture that the mathematics of container datatypes and combinatorial species will be particularly relevant.

The Fellowship will be under the supervision of Professor Jeremy Gibbons at
Oxford, and is available for three years from 31st August 2013 (or any time
before that). The salary is on a standard scale, from £29,541 to £36,298
per annum. For further details, including a job description and information
on how to apply, please see the webpage (http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/news/619-full.html). If you have any questions, please write to me (jeremy.gibbons at cs.ox.ac.uk). Please pass this advert on to anyone you think may be interested.

Jeremy

Jeremy.Gibbons at cs.ox.ac.uk
Oxford University Department of Computer Science,
Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QD, UK.
+44 1865 283521
http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/jeremy.gibbons/