The Informatics Institute, one of the research institutes within the Faculty of Science, and the Leibniz Center for Law, one of the research institutes within the Faculty of Law, have a vacancy for a PhD candidate on Policy-making environment.

Sharing information and digital collaboration is important for increasing performance, lowering costs and reducing risk. Furthermore, digital collaboration makes the creation of new concepts possible, which leads to new business opportunities by providing solutions for optimization challenges. The overarching project will establish an infrastructure where sharing information among partners is easy and robust and can be set up in an ad-hoc fashion. Agreements for information sharing have to be trustworthy, data owners must have full control over who has access to what data and can limit that access to a specific purpose. The infrastructure will maximize business value, enhance existing facilities, comply with various legal requirements whilst allowing partner autonomy. We refer to this infrastructure as a trusted digital marketplace.

As a part of this project the PhD candidate is going to create a generic infrastructure template and protocol for doing federated analytics. The candidate will create a framework to build analytical functions based on metadata and samples. These functions can then be executed on a remote infrastructure. A holistic policy framework will be developed and implemented to set, monitor and enforce specific conditions on any element in the data processing chain. This will establish a trusted data analytics pipeline within the digital market place.

Candidates should have completed a master in computer science or a related field. On a masters level, the candidates must have knowledge of statistics, model building, mathematics and strong coding abilities. Knowledge of law, networks, cyber security and distributed systems is considered as a pre. The candidates must have the ability to give demonstrations to scientific and business audiences. Their grades demonstrate their knowledge and ambition, their master thesis their ability to continue with a PhD research in Computer Science.

The appointment will be full-time (38 hours a week) for a period of four years (initial employment is 18 months). Periodic evaluations will be held after 9 and 14 months, and upon positive evaluation, the appointment will be extended to a total of 48 months. The appointment must lead to a dissertation (PhD thesis). An educational plan that includes attendance of courses, summer and/or winter schools, and national and international meetings will be drafted for the PhD candidate. We also expect the PhD candidate to assist in teaching of undergraduate students.

The salary is in accordance with the university regulations for academic personnel. The salary will range from €2,222 (first year) up to a maximum of €2,840 (last year) before tax per month (scale P) based on a full-time appointment. There are also secondary benefits, such as 8% holiday allowance per year and the end of year allowance of 8,3%. The Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities is applicable.

Among other things, we offer:

• competitive pay and good benefits;
• top-50 University worldwide;
• one of the best deep learning ecosystems in the world;
• interactive, open-minded and a very international city;
• excellent computing facilities.

English is the working language in the Informatics Institute. As in Amsterdam almost everybody speaks and understands English, candidates need not be afraid of the language barrier.

University of Amsterdam

With over 5,000 employees, 30,000 students and a budget of more than 600 million euros, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is an intellectual hub within the Netherlands. Teaching and research at the UvA are conducted within seven faculties: Humanities, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Economics and Business, Law, Science, Medicine and Dentistry. Housed on four city campuses in or near the heart of Amsterdam, where disciplines come together and interact, the faculties have close links with thousands of researchers and hundreds of institutions at home and abroad.  

The UvA’s students and employees are independent thinkers, competent rebels who dare to question dogmas and aren’t satisfied with easy answers and standard solutions. To work at the UvA is to work in an independent, creative, innovative and international climate characterised by an open atmosphere and a genuine engagement with the city of Amsterdam and society.

http://www.uva.nl/en/home

Informatics Institute and Leibniz Center for Law

The Informatics Institute is one of the research institutes within the Faculty of Science. The Leibniz Center for Law is one of the research institutes within the Faculty of Law. Both institutes are running broad research programs with an overlapping interest in simulation based policy analysis. EU Horizon2020 (European Commission programme for financing European research and innovation projects), together with KPMG, is funding a four to five year project within these institutes to develop and implement implement a policy based federated analytics scheme in the context of a trusted digital market place.