PhD student SAMOVAR Laboratory - 3 years Doctoral contract

ABOUT TELECOM SUDPARIS

Telecom SudParis is a public graduate school for engineering, which has been recognized on the highest level in the domain of digital technology. The quality of its courses is founded on the scientific excellence of its faculty and on teaching techniques that emphasize project management, innovation and intercultural understanding. Telecom SudParis is part of the Institut Mines-Telecom, the number one group of engineering schools in France, under the supervision of the Minister for Industry. Telecom SudParis with Ecole Polytechnique, ENSTA Paris, ENSAE Paris, ENPC and Telecom Paris are co-founders of the Institut Polytechnique de Paris, an institute of Science and Technology with an international vocation. Vidéo présentation de Télécom SudParis

ABOUT INSTITUT MINES-TELECOM :

The Institut Mines-Télécom (IMT) is a public institution dedicated to higher education and research for innovation in the fields of engineering and digital technology. Always attentive to the needs of the business world, the IMT combines strong academic and scientific legitimacy, close ties with companies and a unique positioning on the major transformations of the 21st century: digital, energy, industrial and educational. Its activities are carried out by the Mines and Télécom Grandes Ecoles under the authority of the Minister for Industry and Electronic Communications, two subsidiaries and associated partners or partners under agreement. ITM is a founding member of the Alliance Industrie du Futur. It has been awarded the Carnot label for the quality of its research partnerships.
Institut Mines-Télécom video presentation

MISSIONS:

Graph databases offer a powerful and expressive model for managing complex, interconnected data across domains such as genomics, transportation, finance, and collaborative systems. As these workloads scale and are deployed across distributed environments, ensuring data correctness under replication, partitioning, and concurrent access becomes increasingly difficult. Many applications depend on structural and semantic invariants that must be preserved even under concurrent updates and temporarily inconsistent replicas.

This PhD project focuses on enabling reliable and verifiable graph data management in distributed, weakly consistent settings. The goal is to design replicated data structures and update mechanisms that maintain both syntactic well-formedness and rich semantic constraints, despite asynchronous and potentially conflicting operations. While CRDTs provide well-understood solutions for sets and maps, extending these principles to property graphs, which are inherently compositional structures with complex schema and semantic requirements, remains an open challenge.

The research will explore modular, formally grounded techniques for specifying, analyzing, and verifying the behavior of replicated graph structures. This includes the use of declarative specification languages, logic-based modeling, and formal verification tools such as proof assistants and deductive frameworks. Situated at the intersection of distributed systems, graph databases, and formal methods, the project offers opportunities to advance foundational theory and contribute practical tools in collaboration with academic and industrial partners.

The work will be carried out at Télécom SudParis, with close ties to the Laboratoire d'Informatique Gaspard-Monge (LIGM), l'Institut de recherche en informatique fondamentale (IRIF) - France, University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU) - Germany,  NOVA LINCS - Portugal, as well as the other academic and industrial partners involved in the ANR JCJC VERDI.

ACTIVITIES: 

The PhD will focus on:

• Exploring the expressiveness of structural and semantic invariants in property graphs.

• Designing replicated graph data structures that preserve these invariants under concurrency.

• Formally specifying and verifying the correctness of associated update mechanisms.

• Implementing and evaluating the proposed techniques on real-world use cases.

Level of training and / or experience required:

• Master in degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science or Mathematics

Essential skills, knowledge and experience:

• Interest in formal methods, programming languages, or distributed systems.

• Knowledge of functional/logic programming, interactive theorem proving, or deductive verification is a plus.

• Strong mathematical and abstraction skills.

• Motivation to conduct high-quality research in an interdisciplinary and collaborative environment.

Abilities and skills:

• Ability to work as part of a team within national or international research contracts, in collaboration with academic and industrial partners

• Good interpersonal skills

• Ability to synthesize and write

• Curiosity

• Interest in new technologies

• Autonomy

APPLICATION PROCEDURE

• Application deadline: 07/08/2025

• Nature of the contract: 3 years Doctoral contract

• Category and profession of the position: II – T (PhD student)

• To apply, please send us a CV, a cover letter

• Location of the position : Evry-Courcouronnes (France)

• The positions offered for recruitment are open to all with, on request, accommodations for candidates with disabilities

• Working conditions: Teleworking possible, restaurant and cafeteria on site, accessibility by public transport (with employer's participation) or close to main roads, staff association and sports association on campus

• Please send a cover letter, CV, Academic transcripts, Contact information for at least one academic reference

• Contact person: Stefania Dumbrava, stefania.dumbrava@ensiie.fr