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 Next Generation Auditing: Data Assurance as a Service, in the Jacquard 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

Fraude and fraudulent business practices are of all times. Legislators, regulators and financial authorities try to create legal frameworks and procedures for early detection and prevention, but they have failed consistently during the last 10-15 years. This proposal will create a unique cooperation between experts in Dutch auditing theory and software engineering researchers specialized in software analysis and domain-specific languages.

The grand vision of this proposal is to create auditing services that can perform real-time monitoring of companies in order to fundamentally increase the reliability and transparency of financial systems and supporting IT systems. We start with the design of a meta-model for auditing and create the concepts and techniques to describe, analyze, and maintain specific company models and to automatically generate auditing services from them. These services include intake (establishing a company model based on the mining of available data and source code) and monitoring and checking (comparing actual data with the company's model). Key elements of our approach are the use of software analysis to extract facts from financial reports and source code of IT systems, to link the software with actions in the company's model, and to address global issues on maintenance and evolution of these models. The increased trust that is created by these advanced auditing services is in itself an enabler for software services in general.

The PhD will initially start with the study of full automation of questionnaires (including data dependencies between questions) and generating interactive user interfaces for them. These questionnaires are applicable in many domains, including auditing.