ARC North America

The Academic Research Center (ARC) North America supports research through its fellowship program and involvement in the NSERC Business Intelligence Network (website). ARC North America is based in Vancouver, Canada.

ARC FELLOWSHIPS

ARC offers fellowships to graduate students with thesis topics of interest to SAP in the area of Business Intelligence (BI). Fellowship funds are often leveraged by our academic partners to obtain matching funds (e.g., from NSERC/MITACS). Topics actively being investigated with research partners include:

• Exploring multi-touch technologies for BI applications
• Simplifying methods to share, integrate, and visualize private and public data together
• Minimizing data exchanges when synchronizing databases
• Searching metadata to assist with data integration
• Improving methods to view the structure, symmetry, and layout of graphical data
• New technologies to support collaborative decision-making for BI
• New ways to provide summary information while exploring data warehouses
• Augmenting methods for automated testing involving graphical outputs
• Expanding on distributed testing environments
• Optimizing global caches when load-balancing online accesses to semantic objects.

Fellowships are available to both doctoral and master's students. Doctoral ARC Fellowship students are awarded $25,000 CAD per year (maximum of three years). Their faculty supervisors receive an additional $10,000 CAD annually for the duration of the student's fellowship. Master's students in the fellowship program are awarded $20,000 CAD per year (maximum of two years) .Fellowships are renewed annually subject to the student's progress.

ARC Fellowship students are eligible for an annual four-month research residency in Vancouver. Students participating in a residency are paid a residency travel allowance and stipend for living expenses.

INTERESTED IN AN ARC FELLOWSHIP?

We are always interested in research proposals on unsolicited topics that relate to SAP's research interests in Business Intelligence and the activities in our Vancouver office. We are particularly interested in research on the following topics:

• Analytics for Big Data
• Visual analytics
• Analytics on qualitative data
• Enterprise search
• Mobile computing
• Personalized user experience
• Collaborative decision making

To apply, a graduate student and his or her academic supervisor(s) should submit a research proposal to arc@sap.com that includes:

- A brief research plan (maximum two pages), which includes:

• The research problem being addressed
• Proposed approach
• Proposed starting date and timeline; and
• Anticipated benefit(s) to SAP

- CVs for the academic supervisor(s) and student.

Proposals will be reviewed by members from ARC, SAP Research and product development teams.