The department of Computer Science at Karlstad University, Sweden seeks applicants for a PhD student position in the area of Distributed Systems/Mobile Cloud. The student will initially perform his/her studies in the context of the EU-INTERREG IVb funded project ITRACT (Improving Transport and Accessibility through new Communication Technologies).

The general objective of the project is to develop an open service platform that brings together sensor networks, navigation information, intelligent transport systems with distributed computing to allow the rapid development of novel applications and services for mobile users supporting them in their daily transport need. By integrating novel ICT solutions, transport and accessibility of remote areas can be improved in innovative ways. The project’s part covered by the position includes work on mobile cloud systems, service oriented architectures, urban sensing, coordination and decision making.

Research within the computer science department at Karlstad University is focused around the research groups in distributed systems and communications (DISCO), privacy and security (PriSec), and software engineering (SERG). Democratic principles, equality and diversity are the cornerstones of our activities. We value and welcome the enriching presence of a diversity of backgrounds and qualifications among students and staff.

Qualifications
Qualified for the position are candidates with a University degree of 240 ECTS, from which at least 60 ECTS were awarded for courses at advanced level and have a Master's degree or the Swedish Magister or Civilingenjör degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, or equivalent. Qualified are also those candidates who have achieved corresponding degrees and/or knowledge in Sweden or abroad. The candidate should have a strong background from at least one of the areas service oriented architectures, cloud services, sensor networks, intelligent transport systems. Strong programming skills and good English language abilities are pre-requisites for the position. Programming Skills in developing software for mobile platforms such as Android are a plus. The knowledge of the Swedish language is not required.

Admission
Admission is on the basis of individual assessment of the candidates' abilities to successfully pass the research education. The earliest date for filling the position is March 1, 2012. The position is limited to 4 years, but can be prolonged for up to one more year, if the candidate also takes on other research, teaching or administrative tasks besides his/her PhD research. Those tasks should not exceed 20% of the time of a full-time position. Admission will be made provided necessary decisions.

Application
Your application should contain a cover letter motivating your reasons for applying, a CV, copies of your degrees, a list of attended courses with grades and dates, if applicable copies of publications or proofs of other achievements, statement of research interests, and reference letters or contact addresses of reference persons.

More information and online application: https://kau.netrecruiter.se/what:job/jobID:9486/where:4/

On November 24, the Russian Mobile VAS Award contest jury named 11 winner projects of 2011. This year FRUCT won in category most Innovative Business Model (project "Personalized logic system model of vehicle co-using", done by SPIIRAS FRUCT team). Congratulations to the winner team!

Do you have an interest in analyzing Big Data, collected in real life, mobile context? Nokia Research Center Lausanne and its academic Swiss partners (Idiap and EPFL) have recently completed a Data Collection Campaign (http://research.nokia.com/page/11367) in the Lake Geneva region. Rich data from smartphones of almost 200 participants was collected in the course of more than one year. The Mobile Data Challenge (MDC) releases the Lausanne data for the research community.

Description of the Challenge

The Challenge comprises two alternative tracks: Open Track and Dedicated Track.
The Open Track invites you to propose your own Challenge task - one that matches with your own research interests and background.
The Dedicated Track gives you the possibility to take on up to three alternative concrete tasks to solve, with properly defined training and test sets, and evaluation measures that will be used to assess and rank all the contributions. The tasks are related to prediction of the semantic labels of the places, next destinations of the users and demographic attributes from the mobile data.

Important dates

• December, 7th – 2011: Registration deadline for participation
• April, 15th – 2012: Deadline for final submission of Challenge contributions
• June, 18th – 2012: “Mobile Data Challenge by Nokia” workshop; Newcastle, UK (in connection with Pervasive 2012)

Further information and communications

Challenge participation instructions, other further information and updates on the Mobile Data Challenge are available on the web page: http://research.nokia.com/mdc. You can also register to the MDC mailing list or request additional information by sending email to: mobiledata.challenge2012@nokia.com.

The IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) is the premier international forum for research on this topic. Established in 1984, the mission of the conference is to support the design, theory, application, and evaluation of computing technologies and languages for programming, modeling, and communicating, which are easier to learn, use, and understand by people.

From the beginning of the computer age, people have sought easier ways to learn, express, and understand computational ideas. Whether this meant moving from punch cards to textual languages, or command lines to graphical UIs, the quest to make computation easier to express, manipulate, and understand by a broader group of people is an ongoing challenge.

IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing will take place on September 30 – October 4, 2012, in Innsbruck, Austria

The 10th FRUCT conference program is available for download. Keep yourself up to date on the conference news by following news block at www.fruct.org/conference10.

We welcome you to take part in the online Qt training. Video materials are available here.