PhD Position in Verified Voting at ANU

[Dirk Pattinson <dirk.pattinson@anu.edu.au>]

[ not on categories per se but possibly of interest to maths/
    logic graduates ]

Applications are invited for a fully funded PhD position in the
Logic and Computation Group at the Australian National University.

Project:                  Trustworthy Electronic Voting
Supervisors:              Dirk Pattinson and Rajeev Gore
Starting:                 December 2015
Contact:                  Dirk Pattinson (dirk.pattinson@anu.edu.au)
Deadline:                 August 15, 2015

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Project Summary

Verifiable vote counting is one of the cornerstones of a trustworthy
electronic voting system. Correctness and trust can be achieved by
understanding voting protocols, specified textually in legislation, as
formal rules. Vote counting can then be cast as successive rule
application, where the sequence of rule application serves as an
independently verifiable certificate attesting to the correctness of
the count. The project offers a wide range of activities, ranging
from foundations, rule design, efficiency considerations to concrete
case studies. The project seeks to further investigate this idea and
apply it to real-world voting systems and mainly deals with the
following aspects:

- generation of provably correct vote counting functions from rules
- efficiency of rule-based vote counting and certificate checking
- formal proofs of meta-properties of voting protocols
- case studies with real-world voting protocol
- minimising the gap between formal rules and legal specification

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Small Print

- the studentship is open to individuals of any nationality.
- the Logic and Computation Group (http://logic.cecs.anu.edu.au/) is
    part of the Research School of Computer Science
    (http://cs.anu.edu.au/) at the Australian National University
    (http://www.anu.edu.au/).
- We are based in Canberra, Australia, the top-ranking region of the
    2014 OECD quality of life survey
(http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/canberra-named-the-best-place-in-the-worldagain-20141006-10r5sp.html)
- We actively seek to promote diversity in our workplace.

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