Assistant Professor and Postdoc in the field of Operating Systems

Summary

Shinagawa Laboratory at The University of Tokyo is seeking an Assistant Professor and Postdoc in the fields of operating systems, virtualization, and security.

Job Outline

  • Position: Project Assistant Professor and Project Researcher (Postdoc)
  • Location: The University of Tokyo
  • Term: Any time after April 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024, will be renewed annually up to March 31, 2028 (maximum 5 years)
  • Salary: 500,000 to 1,000,000 yen (approximately $3,700 to $7,400) per month
  • Application Deadline: June 30, 2023
  • Application Method: JREC-IN
  • Other Detail: PDF

Job Description

The University of Tokyo is the top university in Japan, ranked 39th in the World University Rankings 2023 of the Times Higher Education (THE). The Shinagawa Laboratory at the University of Tokyo conducts leading-edge system software research focusing on operating systems, virtualization, and security, and has published papers in OSDI, ASPLOS, VEE, and so on. Prof. Shinagawa is affiliated with the Information Technology Center, and therefore this position is also affiliated with the same organization. However, he also holds a position in the Department of Information Physics & Computing, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, from which he accepts master’s and doctoral students to run the laboratory.

The people in these positions are expected to promote a research project led by Prof. Shinagawa and funded by Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) for the Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology (CREST). This research project is entitled “A Comprehensive Security Infrastructure System by Isolated Execution and Formal Verification” which will run for 5.5 years, from October 2022 to March 2028. In this project, we will develop novel isolated execution environments at various levels (process, OS, virtual machine, TEE, hardware, etc.) and verify the interfaces between these execution environments. We will also leverage advanced technologies such as fuzzing and deep learning to implement a variety of novel security features. In addition, we will establish a comprehensive security center to enforce security policies across the entire system, from the cloud to the edge.

Accordingly, the requirements for applicants are as follows.

  1. Applicants must have a doctoral degree by the time of appointment.
  2. Applicants must have a first author paper in a field related to system software
  3. Applicants must have research and development experience in low-layer system software, such as OS kernels and virtualization software.
  4. Applicants must be familiar with system programming languages (e.g., C, C++, Rust) and CPU architectures (e.g., x86, Arm, RISC-V)

The people in these positions must focus primarily on conducting the JST CREST research project, but is also allowed to conduct their own research within 20% of the total work time. The difference between the assistant professor and postdoc is the teaching obligation; the assistant professor is expected to educate students in the laboratory and encouraged to teach in class.

Japan is a safe and clean country filled with fascinating culture and delicious food, and is also easy to live because of friendly people and a low cost of living. COVID-19 restrictions have also been relaxed considerably, making it easier to enter the country. We look forward to hearing from motivated applicants who are willing to promote cutting-edge system software research in Japan and aim to have our papers accepted for top conferences.