[agents] PhD Position: Trust and Authority in an Open Web Environment

[Wan Fokkink]

PhD POSITION:

  "Trust and Authority in an Open Web Environment"

at the VU University Amsterdam, Department of Computer Science

Apply before: 15 March 2008


THE POSITION

This PhD position is concerned with management of trust and authority
for accessing, integrating and distributing information resources with
varying access limitations, ranging from open Web sources to
confidential sources.  More specifically, the student will address the
following research questions:

1. How should trust and authority of data and metadata be represented
   in Web formats?  The work of the student will include the
   development of an ontology that captures the key concepts involved
   in trust and authority.

2. How can one identify and represent trust and authority policies in a
   mixed (open Web, limited access, confidential) environment?  Many
   organizations have trust/authority policies. The challenge here is
   to represent these in an interoperable way, so that we can we use
   and combine them in a (semi-)open setting.

3. Which reasoning techniques can be employed on the trust/authority
   ontology and the policy representations? An important issue here is
   to show that the methods can guarantee the stated trust and
   security requirements.

The use cases in the project are in the area of "maritime safety and
security systems", where there is a mix of public and confidential
information on geographical locations, vessels, and other objects.


THE PROJECT

The PhD student will work in the Poseidon project. Poseidon is a BSIK
project coordinated by the Embedded Systems Institute in Eindhoven and
is funded by the Dutch government. Thales in Hengelo is the use-case
partner.  The student will cooperate with partners in Poseidon with
different backgrounds, in particular in the area of ontology learning
(Prof. dr. Pieter Adriaans, University of Amsterdam) and access an
security policies (Prof. dr. Sandro Etalle, Technical University
Eindhoven).


THE PLACE

The Department of Computer Science provides an exciting academic work
environment with a large range of ongoing national and international
research projects. The student will become a member of the Semantic
Web research group of the VU, which is one of the world leaders in
this area.


QUALIFICATIONS

MsC in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence or related
disciplines. The candidate should have the
capability to function in a large research team.


APPOINTMENT AND SALARY

The Ph.D. student will be appointed for a period of four years. Salary
is based on the salary scales of the VU University Amsterdam.  As part
of their training the student will be enrolled for the courses of the Dutch
graduate school SIKS (School for Information and Knowledge Systems).


INFORMATION AND APPLICATION

Information about the position can be obtained from Prof. dr. Guus
Schreiber (e-mail: <schreiber at cs.vu.nl>; tel: +31 20 598 7739) or
Prof. dr. Wan Fokkink (e-mail: <wanf at cs.vu.nl>; tel: +31 20 598
7735). When sending e-mail, please use "PhD Poseidon" as the subject
line.

Applications including a CV should be sent in electronic form
to Mrs. Elly Lammers (<E.Lammers at few.vu.nl>). The deadline for
applications is 15 March 2008.