Theory of Distributed Systems (TDS)
Theory of Distributed Systems Seminars
Fall 2024
November 1, 2024: Giovanni Reina, Alexandre Pacheco, Heiko Hamann, Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Konstanz, Germany. Blockchain technology for mobile multi-robot systems
Spring 2024
March 8, 2024: Brabeeba Wang. Theory and model of thalamocortical processing in decision-making under uncertainty
March 15: Noble Harasha. Modeling Feasible Locomotion of Nanobots for Cancer Detection and Treatment
April 5: Max Dabagia. Flipping a Coin in the Brain, & Other Cognitive Primitives with Assemblies of Neurons
April 12: Brabeeba Wang. Optimal routing to cerebellum-like structures
April 19: Chi-Ning Chou. Neural Manifold Capacity Captures Representation Geometry, Correlations, and Task-Efficiency Across Species and Behaviors
April 26: Brabeeba Wang. Neuronal calcium spikes enable vector inversion in the Drosophila brain
May 10: Sabrina Drammis. Noise in neural systems
Fall 2023
Oct. 27, 2023: Evie Xie. Insights from Assembly Calculus: Skip Connections Increase Capacity of Associative Memories, and
Synaptic Plasticity Can Explain Creation and Convergence of Working Memory during Interhemispheric Transfer.
Dec. 1: Brabeeba Wang. Learning to plan in a novel environment.
Dec. 8: Dan Alistarh. Accurate Model Compression at GPT Scale.
Spring 2023
April 7: Keith Murray. To attract or to oscillate: Validating dynamics with behavior.
April 21: Jiajia Zhao. Plasticity in the Cerebellar Circuits
April 28: Matt Cavorsi, Stephanie Gil, Frederik Mallmann-Trenn. Dynamic Crowd Vetting: Collaborative Detection of Malicious Robots in Dynamic Communication Networks.
May 19: Noble Harasha. A Comparison of New Swarm Task Allocation Algorithms in Unknown Environments with Varying Task Density.
Fall 2022
Sept. 16: Andrea Richa. Programmable matter.
Sept. 30: Sabrina Drammis. A theoretical model of dorsal medial striatum in decision-making.
October 21: Brabeeba Wang. A biologically realistic circuit for efficient exploration with quantile representation of value and reward prediction error
Oct. 28:
Grace Cai. A Geometry-Sensitive Quorum Sensing Algorithm for the Best-of-N Site Selection Problem
Nov. 18:
Noble Harasha. Deadlock and Noise in Self-Organized Aggregation Without Computation
Spring 2022
April 22: Nancy Lynch. Symbolic knowledge structures and intuitive knowledge structures.
Fall 2021
Nov. 1: Jiajia Zhao. Lack of Quorum Sensing Leads to Failure of Consensus in Temnothorax Ant Emigration.
Spring 2021
Jan. 29: Jiajia Zhao. Lack of Quorum Sensing Leads to Failure of Consensus in Temnothorax Ant Emigration. Also, tradeoffs in ant colonies between flexibility and consensus level, tuned by quorum thresholds.
Feb. 19: Kishori Konwar. SNOW Revisited: Understanding When Ideal READ Transactions Are Possible
March 12: Saket Navlakha. Algorithmic insights on continual learning from fruit flies
March 26: Brabeeba Wang. Thalamic contribution to solving credit assignment in neural systems
April 9: Brabeeba Wang. The dopamine pathway.
May 21, 28: Nancy Lynch, Sabrina Drammis. Berwick-Chomsky book "Why Only Us"?
Fall, 2020
September 11: Yael Hitron. Spiking Neural Networks Through the Lens of Streaming Algorithms
September 18: Sabrina Drammis. Striosomes Selectively Mediate Value-Based Learning Possibly Through Fast Spiking Inhibitory Interneurons.
Oct. 2: Jiajia Zhao. A Comprehensive and Predictive Agent-based Model for Collective House-Hunting in Ant Colonies.
Oct. 16: Bertie Ancona. How to Color a French Flag: Biologically Inspired Algorithms for Scale-Invariant Patterning.
Nov. 13: Mohsen Ghaffari. Network Decomposition and Distributed Derandomization.
Dec. 4: Hagit Attiya, Armando Castañeda, Sergio Rajsbaum. Locally Solvable Tasks and the Limitations of Valency Arguments.
Summer, 2020
June 25: Lewis Tseng. Amortized Constant Round Atomic Snapshot in Message Passing Systems.
July 30: Hsin-Hao Su. On the Locality of Approximate Nash-Williams Forest Decomposition
Spring 2020
February 28, 2020: Saptaparni Kumar: Fault-tolerant atomic storage in truly-dynamic message-passing systems
Fall 2019
December 18, 2019: Quanquan Liu: A Lower Bound for Byzantine Agreement and Consensus for Adaptive Adversaries using VDFs
December 13, 2019: Lewis Tseng: Exact Byzantine Consensus under Local Broadcast Model
October 18, 2019: Lili Su: Learning with Distributed Systems: Adversary-Resillience and Neural Networks
October 11, 2019: Brabeeba Wang: The First at All-Time Convergence Analysis for Biological Oja's Rule to Solve Streaming PCA
Summer 2019
July 26, 2019: Yael Hitron: Counting to Ten with Two Fingers: Compressed Counting with Spiking Neurons
Spring 2019
May 10, 2019: Nicole Wein: Lower Bounds for Dynamic Distributed Task Allocation
May 3, 2019: Radhika Nagpal: Talk about Collective Transport and Navigation in Ants
March 8, 2019: Brabeeba Wang: Integrating Temporal Information to Spatial Information in a Neural Circuit
Fall 2018
December 14, 2018: Quanquan Liu: On Bioelectric Algorithms: A Novel Application of Theoretical Computer Science to Core Problems in Developmental Biology
December 7, 2018: Lewis Tseng: Resilient Causal Memory in Client-Server Model
November 30, 2018: Rati Gelashvili: Why Extension-based Proofs Fail
November 16, 2018: Hoa Vu: Toward the Locality of Vizing's Theorem
October 12, 2018: Adam Alon: Deterministic Abortable Mutual Exclusion with Sublogarithmic Adaptive RMR Complexity
September 14, 2018: Kishori Konwar: FLECKS-Fast Lean Erasure-coded Consistent Key-value Store
Spring 2018
May 18, 2018: Nancy Lynch: An Algorithmic Theory of Brain Networks
May 11, 2018: Siddhartha Jayanti: An Optimal Amortized Algorithm for Abortable Mutual Exclusion
May 4, 2018: Ren Ling: Efficient Synchronous Byzantine Consensus
April 11, 2018: Mohsen Ghaffari: Improved Massively Parallel Computation Algorithms for MIS, Matching, and Vertex Cover
March 23, 2018: Lewis Tseng: Asynchronous Crash-Tolerant Consensus in Directed Graphs
March 16, 2018: Lili Su: Collaboratively Learning the Best Option, using Bounded Memory
March 9, 2018: Frederik Mallmann-Trenn: Self-Stabilizing Task Allocation in Spite of Noise
March 2, 2018: Dominik Pajak: Broadcast in stochastically varying networks
Fall 2017
December 8, 2017: Lili Su: Distributed Statistical Machine Learning in Adversarial Settings: Byzantine Gradient Descent
November 17, 2017: Kishori Konwar: RECS: Reconfigurable, Erasure coded, Consistent Storage
November 9, 2017: Shlomi Dolev: Encountering Challenges in Computer Science, Including, Quantum Safe Public Key Infrastructure
October 27, 2017: Siddartha Jayanti: Concurrent Disjoint Set Union
October 13, 2017: Lewis Tseng: Fault-Tolerant Consensus in Directed Networks
October 6, 2017: Slobodan Mitrovic: MapReduce and approximate Maximal Matchings
September 22, 2017: Dominik Pajak: Speedup in Graph Exploration with Multiple Walkers
September 15, 2017: Lilika Markatou: Leader Election in the SINR Model with Arbitrary Power Control
Spring 2017
April 7, 2017: Kishori Konwar and Prakash Nayarana Moorthy: A Layered Architecture for Erasure-Coded Consistent Distributed Storage
March 24, 2017: Johannes Bill: Unsupervised learning in spiking neural networks with memristor synapses
March 17, 2017: Lili Su: Securing Distributed Systems Against Adversarial Attacks
Fall 2016
December 16, 2016: Merav Parter: Graph Algorithms for Distributed Networks
December 9, 2016: Nicholas Schiefer: Computation and Construction in the Chemical Reaction Network-Controlled Tile Assembly Model
December 2, 2016: Hsin-Hao Su: Distributed Degree Splitting, Edge Coloring, and Orientations
November 22, 2016: Nicholas Schiefer: Models of Distributed Computing in Molecular Programming
November 16, 2016: Fernando Benavides: Introduction to Discrete Morse Theory for Distributed Computing
November 1, 2016: Nisha Panwar: On the Fly Authentication in Vehicular Networks
October 21, 2016: Merav Parter and Cameron Musco: Computational Tradeoffs in Biological Neural Networks: Self-Stabilizing Winner-Take-All Networks
October 17, 2016: Alkida Balliu: Local Distribution Verification
September 30, 2016: Sergio Rajsbaum: Specifying Concurrent Problems: Beyond Linearizability and up to Tasks
Spring 2016
June 16, 2016: Gopal Pandurangan: Distributed Computation of Large-scale Graph Problems
April 1, 2016: Cameron Musco and Hsin-Hao Su: Ant-Inspired Density Estimation via Random Walk
March 18, 2016: Tsvi Kopelowitz: A Class of $O(\log\log^* N)$ Problems in Distributed Computing: Contention Resolution, Counting, and Leader Election
March 4, 2016: Mohsen Ghaffari and Merav Parter: Minimum Spanning Tree in Log-Star Rounds of Congested Clique
February 26, 2016: Mohsen Ghaffari and Hsin-Hao Su: Generalizing the Congested Clique
February 15, 2016: Jimmy Zhu: A Tight Space Bound for Consensus
Fall 2015
December 4, 2015: Kishori Konwar: Storage-Optimized Data-Atomic Algorithms for Handling Erasures and Errors in Distributed Storage Systems
November 6, 2015: Hsin-Hao Su: Distributed (Delta+1)-Coloring in Sublogarithmic Rounds
October 23, 2015: Mohsen Lesani: Certified Causally Consistent Distributed Key-Value Stores
October 9, 2015: Murat Demirbas: Hybrid Clocks for High Auditability
September 25, 2015: Merav Parter: Fault Tolerant BFS Structures: A Reinforcement-Backup Tradeoff
September 18, 2015 Mohsen Ghaffari: An Improved Distributed Algorithm for Maximal Independent Set
Spring 2015
April 24, 2015: Erez Kantor: Computing in Additive Networks with Bounded-Information Codes
April 17, 2015: Mohsen Ghaffari: Distributed Broadcast Revisited: Towards Universal Optimality
April 10, 2015: Stephan Holzer: A Local Broadcast Layer for the SINR Network Model CONTINUED
April 3, 2015: Stephan Holzer: A Local Broadcast Layer for the SINR Network Model
March 20, 2015: Mira Radeva and/or Cameron Musco: Distributed House-Hunting in Ant Colonies
February 10, 2015: Hsin-Hao Su: Distributed Algorithms for the Lovász Local Lemma and Graph Colorin
Fall 2014
December 16, 2014: Kishori Mohan Konwar: Dependable Decentralized Cooperation with the Help of Reliability Estimation
December 5, 2014: Mohsen Lesani: Eventual Consistency
November 21, 2014: Zhiying Wang: smallWig: Compression on RNA-seq Expression Data
November 14, 2014: Mira Radeva: Studying House-Hunting in the Temnothorax Ant Using Distributed Computing Theory
November 7, 2014: Cameron Musco: Linear Sketching and Applications to Distributed Computation
October 31, 2014: Stephan Holzer: The Power of a Leader in the Stone Age
September 19, 2014: Eli Gafni: Generalized Asynchronous Computability Theorem
Spring 2014
May 16, 2014: Grigory Yaroslavtsev: Beyond Set Disjointness: The Communication Complexity of Finding the Intersection
April 11, 2014: Christoph Lenzen: Distributed Steiner Forest Construction
April 4, 2014: Justin Holmgren: Bitcoin
March 14, 2014: Stephan Holzer: Efficient Local Multi-Aggregation and Applications
March 7, 2014: Magnus M. Halldorsson: Algorithmic Models for Wireless Networks
February 28, 2014: Danupon Nanogkai: Distributed Approximation Algorithms for Weighted Shortest Paths
February 21, 2014: Mohsen Ghaffari and Erez Kantor: Multi-Message Broadcast with Abstract MAC Layers and Unreliable Links
February 14, 2014: Mira Radeva: Trade-offs between Selection Complexity and Performance when Searching the Plane without Communication
Fall 2013
December 13, 2013: Jonathan Ponniah: A System-Theoretic Clean Slate Approach to Provably Secure Ad Hoc
November 22, 2013: Alejandro Cornejo: Long-Lived Distributed Localization of Robot Swarms
November 15, 2013: Calvin Newport: Distributed Algorithms in a Wireless World
November 8, 2013: Vasileios Trigonakis: Everything you always wanted to know about synchronization, but were afraid to ask
October 25, 2013: Dan Alistarh: A Practical Renaming Algorithm
October 4, 2013: Erez Kantor: Minimizing Storage and Communication Costs in CDNs
October 11, 2013: Vinod Vaikuntanathan: Tools in Multiparty Communication Complexity, and a lower-bound for Set Disjointness
September 27 2013: Zhiyang Wang: Coding for Information Storage
September 20, 2013: Viveck Cadambe: Coded Atomic Shared Memory Emulation for Message Passing Architectures
Click here for past seminars and more information.