Just getting back from a great visit to Ann Arbor to work with Maxwell Young, Seth Pettie and Valerie King. Perhaps the most important discovery at Ann Arbor for several of us was the existence of sour beer.
I also gave a talk on our polynomial time Byzantine agreement result. The talk went well with many questions and ideas. Unfortunately, though it seems like an hour is the bare minimum to convey the problem and ideas of our algorithm – kind of worried about what to do in 20 minutes at STOC.
Talk slides are now up on my web page. Comments welcome!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: distributed computing, PODC, SPAA, theory
PODC and SPAA accepted papers have been announced. Looks like many interesting papers.
One of my major goals as an academic is to fill up a dinner table at PODC with my former students. This year, Max and Amitabh help me move closer to this goal by winning the academic lottery – both have gotten tenure-track positions at great research-focused CS departments.
Maxwell Young has accepted a position in the CS dept. at Drexel University – an up-and-coming CS dept in Philadelphia. Max has done great work on designing robust algorithms for sensor networks, most recently developing the new analytic technique of resource competitive analysis.
Amitabh Trehan has accepted a position in the CS dept at Queens University in Belfast, UK. Amitabh tells me that Belfast was the launching point for the Titanic, so I have big expectations for the arc of his career there. (I kid Amitabh 
Amitabh designed algorithms for self-healing networks as a PhD student at UNM. Recently, as a post-doc at Technion, he has done great work in leader-election and game theory.
Congratulations to both Max and Amitabh! I’m proud to have worked with both of you, and look forward to many successful collaborations to come.
FOCI (Free and Open Communication on the Internet) is a nice workshop that is co-chaired this year by my colleague and friend Jed Crandall. Many luminaries in the emerging area of anti-censorship are on the PC this year: Roger Dingledine (founder of TOR), Joan Feigenbaum, Nikita Borisov.
If you’ve got something appropriate, it’s a good place to submit. Submissions are due on May 6th.
Nice Wired article on John Wilkes and the Omega software system at Google.
When I was a PhD student, John Wilkes approached my advisor and I with a cool distributed computing problem that eventually led to one of my first SODA papers. John was a great early mentor and I’m not surprised that he continues to be incredibly successful. He’s also an example of a general fact that I’ve found to be true: the most successful systems researchers take theory seriously.
March column for distributed computing news is now online. From Idit Keidar:
The March column deals with coding for distributed storage. It includes:
“What can coding theory do for storage systems?”
by Yuval Cassuto
“An overview of codes tailor-made for better repairability in networked distributed storage systems”
by Anwitaman Datta and Frédérique Oggier
As always, the columns are available online, both at the Technion:
http://www.ee.technion.ac.il/~idish/sigactNews
and at MIT:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/idish/sigactNews
Enjoy!
Idit
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Byzantine agreement, distributed computing, theory
I just put up a paper from Val and I that will appear in this upcoming STOC. The paper is:
Byzantine Agreement in Polynomial Expected Time
It gives the first expected polynomial time algorithm for Byzantine agreement as it was originally posed: adaptive adversary, full-information model, with asynchronous communication. It’s something that we’ve both been working on for many years.
