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!

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.

If you’ve got something appropriate, it’s a good place to submit.  Submissions are due on May 6th.

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.

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

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.

Amitabh is currently a post doc at Technion with Profs. Shay Kutten and Ron Lavi.  Rumor has it that he is looking for a academic position…

Two new SIGACT News Distributed Computing columns are now online.

The September column features a tutorial on distributed Computability:

“Computability in Distributed Computing: a Tutorial”
by Maurice Herlihy, Sergio Rajsbaum, and Michel Raynal.

The forthcoming (December) column reviews distributed computing events
in 2012. Specifically:

- “Transactional Memory: Beyond the First Two Decades”
(Dijkstra Award acceptance speech) by Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit

- “Principles of Distributed Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award”

- Review of PODC 2012 by Siddhartha Sen

- Review of DISC 2012 by Mika Goos

- Review of WTTM 2012 by Vincent Gramoli and Alessia Milani

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!