May 9, 2007

Post-Doc: Privacy Issues and Ambient Intelligence

*
Privacy Issues and Ambient Intelligence
Post-doctoral position
Inria Rhone-Alpes
France
**
*

*Research Context*

The techniques under development in the field of ambient intelligence may soon lead to a society where people are surrounded by intelligent objects capable of interacting in an unobtrusive and often invisible way. While many applications of ambient intelligence benefit to the users, these new techniques also present enormous technical challenges for privacy and security because of the huge amount of behavioral, personal and even biological data being recorded and disseminated.

But privacy policies are difficult to characterize, to specify and to implement. In addition, enforcing privacy cannot be tackled exclusively by technical means: this is clearly one of the areas where strong interactions are required between experts from various disciplines (technology, law, social sciences, etc.).

The PRIAM project (http://priam. citi.insa- lyon.fr/) has been set =20 up to
address these issues in a transversal and multidisciplinary way. PRIAM will put strong emphasis on the collaboration between lawyers and experts from the information and communication technology. The focus of the project will be as follows:

- On the methodological side: put forward or characterize techniques which can meet both legal and technical requirements.

- On the technological side: emphasize the design of privacy policies that are amenable to realistic implementations in the ambient world.

This objective requires strong interactions between experts in formal methods, in operating systems and communication technologies.

*
Postdoctoral research project*

The goal of the postdoctoral work is to contribute to the upstream part of the PRIAM project, which consists in designing a framework for the definition of privacy policies. This framework should have a clear semantics, so as to avoid any ambiguities, and be amenable to a realistic implementation on resource-constraine d devices. In addition, it should be expressive enough to distinguish different kinds of usages (e.g. read, store), purposes, conditions (e.g. time range) and obligations (e.g. declaration) and should be translatable into a language that can be understood by the different parties involved. Another desirable feature is to express the aggregation of data and its transfer from one device or "privacy sphere" to another
one.

This study will be conducted in close interaction with the legal part of the project which will provide further constraints (e.g. with respect to consent, accountability, liability, etc.

*Required knowledge and background *

The successful candidate should have some familiarity with formal methods (specification, verification, analysis). Additional knowledge in areas like security and programming languages is also welcome, as well as some interest for legal issues.
These are not prerequisites for the position though, and we are fairly open to customize the postdoctoral research project to fit with the interests of the
selected candidate.

*Location*

INRIA Rhone-Alpes research unit in Meylan-Montbonnot (close to Grenoble, capital of the French Alps, and one of the most active areas in Europe for research in Information and Communication Technologies) . INRIA is the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control. It is a public scientific and technological institute operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Research and the Ministry of Economy, Finance and Industry.

Created in December 1992, the INRIA Rh=99ne-Alpes research unit hosts about 500 people, including about 150 researchers and the same number of PhD students.

*Dates*

Application deadline: May 31^st , 2007
Postdoc starting date: between July and December 2007

*Links*

PRIAM project: http://priam. citi.insa- lyon.fr/

INRIA:
http://www.inrialpe s.fr/11733688646 49/1/fiche_ __actualite/
&RH=3DACCUEIL_ EN/
&RH=3DACCUEIL_ EN/>

*
Contact *

Candidates should send a resume to: Daniel dot Le-Metayer at inrialpes dot fr

[sursa beasiswa]

If you want to receive academic resources in your e-mail on daily basis, please subscribe to 10resources-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

If you want to publish your announcement, please send it to riliescu2000@yahoo.com.