The Saarbrücken Graduate School in Computer Science

• An integrated program from BSc or MSc to PhD
• Top-notch academic and research training in computer science
• Unparalleled concentration of computer science research expertise in Europe
• International program run entirely in English
• Scholarships and other forms of financial support
• Next application deadline: 29 April 2011 uptake Winter Semester 2011/12 (October)
• More information at
  http://frweb.cs.uni-sb.de/index.php?id=7&L=0

Mobility of Young People in Europe (Questionnaire)

Young? Fond of traveling abroad to boost your education? What exactly do you expect to gain when studying abroad? Or when doing an internship abroad? Or when just doing a trip in some other country? Which advantages and disadvantages does a young person have when being mobile?

The Young European Federalists (JEF) want to study these questions and need your support. Their online questionnaire contains questions about mobility during education & training and requires approximately 10 minutes for filling in:

English Version/ German Version / French Version

Evaluation is anonymous and the results will be published after the 1st of August 2009 on the JEF website. JEF will use the results to make suggestions to politicians in order to achieve equal opportunities, to provide support and information for young people who want to travel abroad.

Junior Research Groups at Saarland University

Saarland University is seeking to establish several junior research groups within the recently established Cluster of Excellence “Multimodal Computing and Interaction.” Here is the official announcement.

Shift Happens

Nice presentation I found on the blog of an old friend.

Microsoft Supports IMPRS-CS

Press Release: Microsoft Research Contributes up to €1 Million for Exceptional PhD Research at the International Max Planck Research School for Computer Science.

Information Security and Cryptography Group

It is finally public that I will do my PhD in the Information Security and Cryptography Group under the supervision of Prof. Michael Backes. The field is Language-based Security, and I will most likely focus on the static analysis of security protocols and security protocol implementations.

Stuttgart

IMPRS-CS PhD Fellowship

Yesterday, after a 15 minutes talk I gave early in the morning, I was accepted for the IMPRS-CS PhD fellowship. A big thank you to my four recommenders: Prof. Gert Smolka, Prof. Michael Backes, Prof. Andreas Zeller and Dr. Jan Schwinghammer.

Some Things About IBM

Only after my visit to Stuttgart I realize how little I knew about IBM. Only on the night before my trip I shortly looked at their Wikipedia entry. So what did I know before:

• IBM stood for Identical Blue Men, so I was expecting all their employees to wear suits.
• Their involvement with open source software: Linux, Eclipse, Derby, Geronimo, Harmony etc.
• Their hardware, especially the mainframes, which I always associated with maintaining very old programs written in languages like COBOL and Fortran.
• Their scary patents. Scary because of the extremely bad reputation software patents have among developers.
• The fact that they have a highly regarded research lab in Zurich.

Here are some things I hardly knew anything about:

• IBM is a business services company. More than half of their revenues comes from services, not from software or hardware as many would expect. However, they are so big that they are still the largest hardware company in the world, and the second largest software company after Microsoft. Approximatively 330,000 employees in 170 countries, 91 billion dollars in revenues, and almost 10 billions in profit per year – quite amazing numbers.
• Their five most important software projects are: WebSphere, DB2, Lotus, Rational and Tivoli. Even if I heard about them before, these names might not tell you anything. This is all corporate software, so you won’t find any of it selling at Metro. Also their focus is on solutions for the problems or their clients, and not so much on product branding.
• What gives IBM the edge over their competitors is innovation. During the years IBM employees have earned five Nobel Prizes and four Turing Awards. And even if I don’t quite like this measure of innovation: they are by far the company with the most patents in the world.
• Their corporate culture is very much based on “employee growth”. IBM offers career opportunities for managers, but also for technical-oriented employees.
• Not everybody wears a suit at IBM. Actually, seems like only managers and the people who have contact with the clients wear suits. Technical people wear jeans and casual clothes.

PARC Internships 2007

Want to try something different?

As one of the most innovative and prolific research laboratories in the U.S., Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) offers its interns a truly exceptional research and work experience.

PARC-the birthplace of laser printing, Ethernet, the graphical user interface (GUI), and ubiquitous computing-has a unique Multidisciplinary culture spanning disciplines within physical, computational, and Social sciences.