We are looking for a hard-working, motivated, and talented PhD student with a special interest in combinatorial algorithms and their application in data mining, bioinformatics, data compression, and information retrieval. The PhD student will be positioned at CWI within the Gravitation Research Program NETWORKS (website) funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

There are several techniques addressing the fundamental problem of protecting individual sequence data such as medical records, purchase data, movement data, web-search query data or DNA data. These techniques have hardly been employed in practice because: (1) they offer unsatisfactory privacy or utility guarantees or assume that the data collector protects the data, an operation that most data collectors are unable or unwilling to perform; (2) these techniques mostly rely on optimizing generic criteria (e.g. information-theoretic or distance measures), which are not necessarily linked to data analytic tasks.

 In this project, we will consider the challenging and practical setting where analytics must be performed accurately on transformed (sanitized) data. We will be typically interested in designing tools with theoretical guarantees on privacy-utility trade-offs. This setting requires new privacy models and algorithms; in particular, combinatorial algorithms on strings and graphs. The ultimate goal is to develop a new framework (model, algorithms, implementations) for privacy preserving in sequence data that is: (1) provably privacy-preserving; (2) useful and usable; and (3) extensible.

Supervised by: Solon P. Pissis (website) and Leen Stougie (website).

Candidates are required to have a Master’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics or a related discipline, and a specialization in Algorithms, Combinatorics, Combinatorial Optimization or related fields. Preferable qualifications for candidates include proven research talent in a Master’s project, an excellent command of English, and good academic writing and presentation skills.

The terms of employment are in accordance with the Dutch Collective Labour Agreement for Research Centres ("CAO-onderzoeksinstellingen"). The initial labour agreement will be for a period of 18 months. After a positive evaluation, the agreement will be extended by 30 months. The gross monthly salary, for a PhD student on a full time basis, is €2,346 during the first year and increases to €3,007 over the four year period.

Employees are also entitled to a holiday allowance of 8% of the gross annual salary and a year-end bonus of 8.33%. CWI offers attractive working conditions, including flexible scheduling and help with housing for expat employees.

Please visit our website for more information about our terms of employment: https://www.cwi.nl/jobs/terms-of-employment

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI)

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) is the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science and is part of the Institutes Organisation of NWO. The mission of CWI is to conduct pioneering research in mathematics and computer science, generating new knowledge in these fields and conveying it to trade, industry, and society at large.

CWI is an internationally oriented institute, with 160 scientists from approximately 27 countries. The facilities are first-rate and include excellent IT support, career planning, training, and courses. CWI is located at Science Park Amsterdam that is presently developing into a major location of research in the natural sciences in The Netherlands, housing the sciences of the University of Amsterdam and of the Vrije Universiteit as well as several other national research institutes next to CWI.

Gravitation Programme Networks

To find more information about the Gravitation Programme Networks, please visit NETWORKS website.