Religious programming (Lancastrian)
Prof. Awais Rashid of the Computing Department at Lancaster University is looking for a Ph.D. student to help him in “rethinking the? classical notions of abstraction in software engineering.”
He’s offering a position called “PhD Studentship - Divinity and Abstraction: A Theory of Software Engineering ?for Systems-of-Systems .” Closing date for applications: 15 May 2008. The project has five key phases. The first four are:
1. Study of debates on the nature of the holy trinity and the divinity of Jesus (e.g., between early church fathers, such as Irenaeus and Tertullian, and the authors of texts, such as those discovered at Nag Hammadi, that did not form part of the Nicene Creed) as well as the treatises on transubstantiation during the Reformation (e.g., the writings of John Wyclif) to understand how monotheistic theology has treated varying natures of divinity.
2. Contrasting the study in (1) with eastern religious philosophies, such as Hinduism, which are inherently founded on the multi-faceted nature of divinity.
3. Analysing the factors that bind the followers of a religion in a loosely coupled fashion across geographical and cultural boundaries and how the interpretations of divinity differ across these boundaries in both types of theologies.
4. Formulating a theory of abstraction for systems-of-systems by reconciling results of (1)-(3) with the existing classical technical notions of abstraction for software systems, especially roles, views and aspects all of which facilitate multi-faceted abstraction that goes beyond traditional module boundaries.
(Thanks to investigator Rémi Bastide for bringing this to our attention.)