UNSW: PhD APAI Scholarship available - Integrating end user processes with SOA paradigm

Position opening for a PhD student:

The school of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at UNSW just
acquired a linkage grant with an industry partner Beacon IT Group
(http://www.beaconit.com.au) for a research project on Integrating end
user processes with SOA paradigm. The academic members involved at CSE,
UNSW are A/Prof. Boualem Benatallah and Dr. Hye-young Helen Paik. The
project will be conducted at CSE, UNSW in Sydney in close collaboration
with the industry partner.

The scholarship on offer through the grant is APA(I) (Australian
Postgraduate Awards -Industry) scholarship. The annual stipend for 2007
is $25,627 per annum (tax free). The stipend is paid in fortnightly
instalments. The industry partner makes upto $6,000 extra contribution
towards the project. There is also adequate funding for PhD students to
travel.

Below is a brief description of the project. Interested candidates can
contact A/Prof. Benatallah (boualem@cse.unsw.edu.au) or Dr. Paik
(hpaik@cse.unsw.edu.au) directly.

Project Title: Integrating end-user processes with SOA paradigm

Service oriented architecture and business process modelling emerged as
response to the general problems of enterprise application integration
(EAI) and enterprise information integration (EII). The technologies
offer standardised support for integrating heterogeneous resources, data
sources, and applications in the form of standardised APIs. Clearly,
professional developers now benefit from high-level and integrated
access to data, computing and application resources. However, the
benefits of SOA and business process technologies have not reached the
end-users who have some knowledge in using IT systems but are not
professional programmers. This is indeed a large population of user
base and constitutes a key component of major enterprise and end user
applications including e-government, e-business, media, e-health. For
instance, it was estimated in 2001, that in the USA alone 45 millions of
such users rely on tools such spreadsheet to visualize, manipulate, and
analyze data. This project proposes to design and develop abstractions,
models and languages in SOA paradigm which are focused on assisting the
end-users with their everyday computing tasks and business processes.