James Aspnes: Population Protocols

Abstract:

The population protocol model was proposed by Angluin et al. in 2004 to represent computations by sensor networks composed of computationally weak agents with no control over their movement. Since then, it has been used to model chemical reaction networks and biological systems, and many variants of the original model have been proposed. I will give an overview of the population protocol model and its applications, discuss some of the core results on the computational power of the model under various assumptions, describe how the model has evolved, and discuss new problems that have arisen because of this evolution.