PhD - IT consultancy position in Supply Chain Exploration for Energy Efficiency in Big Data (1.0...

SummaView and Utrecht University are offering a five-year dual PhD-IT consultancy position in the field of data governance. SummaView is an organization that supports customer organizations in providing insights into their vast amounts of data; not by gathering more, but by providing only the essential.
SummaView and Utrecht University are collectively concerned with the amounts of energy that are consumed by data. A Carnegie Mellon University study concluded that the energy cost of data transfer and storage is about 7 kWh per gigabyte. Saving and storing 100 gigabytes of data in the cloud per year would result in a carbon footprint of about 0.2 tons of CO2.

We believe that the key to solving this energy problem lies in data governance. Why must heavy queries be run at night and what is their cost? How much replication is really necessary? Why can’t we do the queries at the source? How do we better get only the essential? And how do we report the achievements of better data governance in terms of energy efficiency? How do we make explicit that data governance directly contributes to corporate environmental responsibility?

As SummaView is regularly handling large amounts of data for customers, this dual position is a suitable combination of practical work and research. We are looking for a result-driven candidate with a passion for IT and a green heart. It is possible to test our findings within the testing center of Dell Technologies, including access to the latest hardware and software technology.

For two days a week you will be working with Utrecht University, within the Information and Computing Sciences institute. The university offers training programs, academic resources, and supervision for your PhD. During your research, you will progressively publish your work in top level academic outlets, with the goal of collecting enough work for a PhD thesis. It is also not uncommon to supervise master students.