The Programming Languages Group seeks a Research Fellow to work on the newly funded 3-year EPSRC project, Energise: Refactorings and Skeletons for Energy-Aware Applications on High-Performance Embedded Systems.

Embedded devices, such as mobile phones, drones, medical devices and even satellite imaging are now common place in society. These types of devices rely very heavily on battery power, contributing to climate change and global warming. Optimizing the software that runs on such devices for energy is a very challenging problem for software developers. The Energise project aims to address this issue by providing the developer with a refactoring tool to repurpose their software to make it consume less energy, and to do it in such a way that the code is guaranteed to still meet its specification.

The Energise project aims to develop new, formally-motivated, refactorings and transformations that reduce energy consumption for embedded multi-core devices. This includes implementing refactorings for target languages such as C; proving general soundness of the refactorings using e.g. dependent types; developing new programming abstractions (skeletons) for abstracting common energy-reducing programming patterns; running experiments; writing proofs of correctness.

The post will require skills in formal semantics of programming languages, compilers, program transformation, lightweight formal methods (including, e.g. dependent types) and knowledge of parallelism and non-functional properties, including energy.

Informal enquiries can be directed to Dr Chris Brown (cmb21@st-andrews.ac.uk).

Applications are particularly welcome from women, people from the Black, Asian, Minority or Ethnic (BAME) community and other protected characteristics who are under-represented in research posts at the University.

The University is committed to equality for all, demonstrated through our working on diversity awards (ECU Athena SWAN/Race Charters; Carer Positive; LGBT Charter; and Stonewall). More details can be found at http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/hr/edi/diversityawards/.

School of Computer Science
Salary: £33,797 - £36,914 per annum
Fixed Term: 3 years
Start: As soon as possible