Founded in 1946, the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) is the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands. It is located at the Science Park Amsterdam and is part of the “Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research” (NWO). The institute is internationally focused and renowned for its high quality research. Over 160 researchers conduct pioneering research and share their acquired knowledge with society. More than 30 researchers are employed as professors at universities. The institute has generated twenty-one spin-off companies.

CWI maintains excellent relations with industry and the academic world, both in the Netherlands as well as abroad. After their research careers at CWI, an increasing number of young staff members find employment in these sectors, for example in spin-off companies that are based on research results from CWI. Of course, library and computing facilities are first-rate. CWI's non-scientific services to its personnel include career planning, training and courses, and assistance in finding housing.

The Software Analysis and Transformation Group (SEN1) has a vacancy for a talented

PhD student,

on the subject of Information Visualization applied to Software in the Escher project.

Research group

SEN1 studies software systems: their design, their construction and their inevitable evolution. The mission is to learn to understand software systems and to improve their quality. The focus is on complexity as the primary quality attribute of software systems. Software complexity is an important subject, which is not only due to the ubiquity of software systems and failing ICT projects in society. SEN1 studies the causes of software complexity and how complex systems can be made simpler.

Job description

Software dominates our modern civilization. However, as size, complexity, and lifetime of software in- crease, so does its cost. It is estimated that software maintenance exceeds 80% of the total development costs. Of this, nearly half is spent in program understanding. Two main classes of instruments support program understanding. First, program analysis techniques extract a wealth of information from source code, dynamic program execution, and the development pro- cess itself, such as models, metrics, and proofs of correctness. Secondly, software visualization methods present this information in interactive ways to support the comprehension process using techniques such as graph layouts, diagrams, dense pixel displays, treemaps, glyphs, and timelines.

However, a fundamental gap is identifiable between the two: software analysis and visualization are not integrated in ways that effectively and efficiently support the sense-making, reasoning process, and hypothesis forming central to understanding. We argue that this gap is at the center of the limited adoption and success of software visualization methods and, arguably, of some more complex software analysis methods. For software visualization to make a true difference, it has to be centered on answering the questions of its stakeholders, rather than show the data emerging from program analyses.

We cast software analysis and visualization in a new framework, inspired by the highly successful visual analytics field. Central to our approach is providing abstractions, methods and tools that enable the stakeholders to effectively and efficiently formulate their questions as directly and as easily as possible, and ways that translate these questions, abstracting away from the raw analysis data, into suitable combinations of analysis and visualization instruments.