Theory of Distributed Systems (TDS)

Theory of Distributed Systems Seminars

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.