Research Assistant Grade 7 on Enforcement of Constraints on XML Streams

Enforcement of Constraints on XML Streams

Full-time Research Assistant

Grade 7: Salary £27,466 - £33,780 p.a.

The project concerns the development of runtime monitors which check for data quality violations within XML feeds and react to quality violations: reactions include terminating processing of the stream, dropping portions of the payload, or attempting a repair. We are particularly interested in XML feeds that arise in the context of secure message-processing. The project lies at the intersection of several topics – runtime monitoring, secure messaging, XML processing, and integrity-constraint validation.

A three-year research position is available to workon a project to extend the theory of constraint processing in the XML context, and to develop a prototypical implementation that can efficiently deal with rich sets of constraints on large numbers of simultaneous message feeds.

The postdoctoral assistant will work with two doctoral students, principal investigator Prof. Michael Benedikt, and visiting researcher Dr. Alan Jeffrey of Bell Laboratories in:

• Extending the theory of efficient streaming validation to deal with both aggregate constraints and keys.
• Investigating theoretical issues in XML constraint processing, including:
  • Devising techniques to prove bounds on the size of stream-processors for XPath constraints.
  • Investigating optimisation techniques for BDD-based XML stream processors
• Developing both policy specification languages and implementation techniques for repairing constraint violations.
• Developing a full constraint management system, based on the above mentioned theoretical results, and to conduct an empirical performance evaluation.

Further Particulars, including the application method, are available here

The closing date for applications is 1 November 2008.

The policy and practice of the University of Oxford require that all staff are offered equal opportunities within employment. Entry into employment with the University and progression within employment will be determined only by personal merit and the application of criteria which are related to the duties of each particular post and the relevant salary structure. In all cases, ability to perform the job will be the primary consideration. Subject to statutory provisions, no applicant or member of staff will be treated less favourably than another because of his or her age, sex, marital or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, religion or belief, racial group or disability.