The University of Coimbra offers three research grants to work on the Project “EUBra-BIGSEA - EUrope- BRAzil Collaboration on BIG Data Scientific REsearch through Cloud-Centric Applications” funded by the European Commission under the Cooperation Programme, Horizon 2020. EUBRA-BIGSEA will provide an integrated, elastic and dynamic big data cloud platform to address knowledge discovery by tackling data volume, variety, velocity and veracity issues as well as privacy, security and QoS challenges. Work is to be carried out at the Department of Informatics Engineering, part of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology) and the candidate will be integrated in the Software and Systems Engineering research group of the Centre of Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra (CISUC). Each of the grants involves work in a specific area described below.

Development of an AAA solution including two distinct AAA blocks, which have distinct functionality: the EUBra-BIGSEA Infrastructure AAA, which provides the AAA functionalities required for managing the EUBra-BIGSEA framework (access to cloud resources), from both the Infrastructure and Platform perspectives (focusing on infrastructure managers and application developers/providers); and the EUBra- BIGSEA Applications AAAaaS, which provides AAA-as-a-Service for applications developed and hosted in the EUBra-BIGSEA framework and in need of services for authenticating and authorizing their end users.

Development of security assessment techniques and tools for virtualization infrastructures and application containers. This includes performing field studies and researching security testing techniques and code analysis to uncover problems of availability, confidentiality, integrity and isolation in the potential solutions.

Development of security assessment techniques and tools for Application Development APIs and services. This includes performing field studies and researching security testing techniques and code analysis to uncover problems of availability, confidentiality, integrity, and interoperability in the EUBrasilCloudFORUM framework.

The vision of the Software and Systems Engineering (SSE) group is to develop disruptive research on different facets of software and systems engineering. The group core competences include dependability and security aspects, software development methodologies and languages, and big data processing. Internationally recognized contributions of the group include: experimental dependability evaluation, using software fault injection as core enabling technology; dependability and security benchmarking in large databases and web based systems; component based software development issues, namely experimental risk assessment and component reutilization techniques; and software verification and validation. The group has also been highly involved in research on: development of concurrent programming models; management in heterogeneous parallel and distributed environments, with emphasis on performance and quality of service; dependable grids; autonomic computing; and automatic fault handling models. Partitioning techniques for data warehouse distribution in large clusters of simple machines and complex event processing (CEP) systems are two recent research topics.

The duration of each grant is 6 months, renewable up to a total of 3 consecutive years. Please check the complete details regarding the application at the following links:

The University of Coimbra is the oldest university in Portugal and was the only university in the Portuguese speaking world until the 20th century, being nominated as World Cultural Heritage by UNESCO in June 2013. Given the atmosphere of the University, Coimbra is also a Science and Technology city. It features one of the leading science based incubators of Europe, the Instituto Pedro Nunes (IPN), which has been awarded the price for The Best Science Based Incubator at the 2010 Science Based Incubation Conference. Some technology-based Coimbra University spin-offs are innovative businesses with a considerable success in the world market.