PhD position in Software Engineering

Information about the division and the department
The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Chalmers and University of Gothenburg in Sweden with approximately 300 employees from more than 30 countries is widely recognized for excellent research and education. Our department is located in Sweden’s second largest city Gothenburg – the world’s most sustainable destination every year since 2016 according to the Global Destination Sustainability Index. The four research divisions at our department are essential scientific facilitators in a vibrant ecosystem of software-intensive companies such as Volvo, Ericsson, and Einride. This ecosystem is complemented by a growing start-up scene supported by collaboration hubs like MobilityX Labs and AI Sweden, the national center for applied AI that is bringing together over 120 partners across public and private sectors including academia.
We are announcing up to two PhD positions that are placed at the Division for Interaction Design and Software Engineering with Chalmers University of Technology as the employer. Our division provides world-leading research and education in the development of complex and software-intense systems and is characterized by extensive international cooperation as well as close collaboration with the local industry. With approximately 50 researchers including PhD students, PostDocs, and professors, we are one of the largest academic software engineering research groups in the world. Our core expertise is in AI Engineering, software testing, requirements engineering, behavioral software engineering, and software engineering for automotive systems. Being broadly recognized in the academic community, our division has hosted top international conferences such as ICSE, SPLC, ICSA, REFSQ, and EASE during the past recent years.

Major responsibilities
The position comes with enrollment in the PhD program for Computer Science and Engineering, designed for 5 years. As a PhD student, you acquire the skills and knowledge to conduct independent research in the field of software engineering. You also contribute to the development of knowledge in the subject by writing a scientific dissertation. This includes devoting 80% of your working time to performing research under the supervision of experienced researchers.

Typically, this means carrying out research, writing academic articles, and taking courses to complement your background.
The remaining 20% of your working time is devoted to departmental duties, such as helping as teaching assistant in courses offered by the University. Those duties can be concentrated on certain parts of the year depending on the needs of the business in consultation with the students.


Information about the position
Together with the successful applicant(s), we aim to investigate, develop, and systematically evaluate automated approaches to make autonomous systems more adaptive to humans and their needs. Autonomous systems can range from smart cloud-based systems to robots to automotive systems to Internet of Things systems. In the past, we have developed approaches to elicit quality requirements from human users, to explain the quality tradeoffs in automated planning using machine learning techniques, and to monitor systems in an adaptive way, so that safety constraints can be guaranteed while saving bandwidth. We found that it is crucial to not only elicit requirements when designing a system, but help humans to understand which requirements are feasible and how they impact other requirements at runtime. Depending on the context that a system operates in, it might be more or less desirable to ask a human for help, start collaborative tasks, or to give control to a human user. How can safety and security constraints be guaranteed in different contexts? How can humans express their changing preferences at runtime?  

As a PhD student, you will have the opportunity to engage in both empirical research and constructive research. Constructive research involves designing architectures of human-aware systems, programming, or developing formal models to reason about these systems. Empirical research includes running experiments and performing studies with humans to assess the usefulness of the developed approaches. 

The successful applicant’s position will be funded by WASP. Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP) is Sweden’s largest individual research program ever, a major national initiative for strategically motivated basic research, education and faculty recruitment. The program addresses research on artificial intelligence and autonomous systems acting in collaboration with humans, adapting to their environment through sensors, information and knowledge, and forming intelligent systems-of-systems. The vision of WASP is excellent research and competence in artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and software for the benefit of Swedish industry. Read more: https://wasp-sweden.org/  

The graduate school within WASP is dedicated to provide the skills needed to analyze, develop, and contribute to the interdisciplinary area of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and software. Through an ambitious program with research visits, partner universities, and visiting lecturers, the graduate school actively supports forming a strong multi-disciplinary and international professional network between PhD-students, researchers and industry.   

For more information about qualifications, contract term, what we offer and the application procedure, please visit Chalmers web pages.

See link: PhD position in Software Engineering