The Scholarship

PhD position (Open Source Software)

The Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zurich, offers a position for a PhD student working in the project “On the Interplay between Social Interactions and Software Architecture in Open Source” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), starting as soon as possible.

This project brings together the fields of software engineering, statistical physics, and management to reap synergies between them and to advance the understanding of the complex socio-technological dynamics underlying Open Source Software, beyond the scope of one particular discipline.
The aims of this project are:

• To establish a holistic picture of the phenomenon of Open Source
• To understand the statistical laws governing the evolution of the software architecture, which may help developers to steer development towards favorable architectures
• To study the self-organization of projects and the resulting social dynamics, on the level of both software users and developers
• To analyze the link between software architecture and the project organization, as well as between the corresponding dynamics, which may enable new management principles or provide tools for smoothening the interface between software, developers, and users

Requirements:

• MSc degree or equivalent in computer science or a related field
• ability to develop formal models and computer simulations
• ability to combine data analysis and modeling
• good knowledge about graph algorithms and social network analysis is a plus
• strong abilities to communicate in an interdisciplinary scientific environment
• interest in becoming acquainted with methods from physics, economics, and management

We offer excellent working conditions in a lively team and cooperations with leading institutions worldwide.

Applicants are kindly requested to send their curriculum vitae, list of publications, names of at least three references, and an overview of their research interests (all in PDF files), to

Ms. Rahel Dulik
rdulik@ethz.ch

For specific inquiries, please contact Prof. Dr. Dr. Frank Schweitzer (fschweitzer@ethz.ch).

website link:

http://www.sg.ethz.ch/openpositions/phd_oss