We are looking for two highly motivated and bright PhD students with a strong expertise and interest in graph and network algorithms in particular, and in theoretical computer science in general, to join our team around our project on “Fast Algorithms for a Reactive Network Layer”.

Traditionally and still today, communication networks are operated in a rather static and conservative manner. This has good reasons: communication networks constitute a critical infrastructure of our digital society, and dynamic optimizations always come with risks of instabilities or even outages. However, it is also known that in principle a more dynamic network operation can greatly improve the efficiency of networks: empirical studies show that communication traffic contains much structure, i.e., it is bursty and skewed. More dynamic network operations are also useful to support adaptive policy changes, service relocations, or emerging “self-driving networks". This project is motivated by the desire to leverage the benefits of more flexible network operations but without sacrificing the reliability guarantees of more conservative operations. In fact, we believe that a more adaptive network operation can even improve the dependability of a network.

We aim to lay the theoretical and algorithmic foundations of more adaptive networks, using algorithmic tools from dynamic graph algorithms, approximation algorithms, online algorithms and distributed algorithms. In addition to our theoretical contributions, we also aim to show the practical importance of our approaches (possibly in collaboration with an Internet Service Provider).
 

The positions are 30h/week and shared by the research groups “Theory and Applications of Algorithms”, led by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Monika Henzinger, and  “Communication Technologies”, led by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Stefan Schmid. Both research groups are internationally well-known and received ERC grants in the past.

For more information, please contact Prof. Henzinger and Prof. Schmid by email.

The application submission is handled online under https://personalwesen.univie.ac.at/en/jobs-recruiting/job-center/ but you can also submit your application material by an email addressed to both professors.