Chryssis Georgiou,

University of Cyprus –

Abstract:

The need for high-performance computing and the growing use of personal computers
and their capabilities, and the wide access to the Internet, have established
Internet-based computing as an inexpensive alternative to supercomputers. The most
popular form of Internet-based computing is volunteer computing, where computing
resources are volunteered by the public to help solve (mainly) scientific problems.
BOINC is a popular platform where volunteer computing projects run, such as SETI@home.
Profit-seeking computation platforms, such as Amazonís Mechanical Turk, have also
become popular. One of the main challenges for further exploiting the promise of
such platforms is the untrustworthiness of the participating entities.

In this talk I will focus on Internet-based Master-Worker task computations, where
a master process sends tasks, across the Internet, to worker processes to compute
and return back a result. Workers, however, are not trustworthy, and might be at
their best interest (or due to malice or malfunction) to report incorrect results.
Through different studies, workers have been categorized as either malicious
(always report an incorrect result), altruistic (always report a correct result),
or rational (report whatever result maximizes their benefit). I will explain how
such computations can be modeled using evolutionary dynamics and identify the
conditions under which the master can reliably obtain the task results.

The talk is based on work performed jointly with Evgenia Christoforou (IMDEA
Networks), Antonio Fernandez Anta (IMDEA Networks), Miguel Mosteiro (Pace Univ.)
and Angel Sanchez (Univ. Carlos III de Madrid).

Bio

Chryssis Georgiou is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer
Science at the University of Cyprus. He holds a Ph.D. (December 2003) and M.Sc. (May 2002) in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Connecticut and a B.Sc. (June 1998) in Mathematics from the University of Cyprus. His research interests span the Theory and Practice of Fault-tolerant Distributed and Parallel Computing with a focus on Algorithms and Complexity. Specific topics includeDistributed Cooperation, Distributed Storage, Information Dissemination and Algorithmic Game Theory. He has published more than 70 articles in journals and conference proceedings in his area of study and he has authored two books on Robust Distributed Cooperative Computing. He served on several Program Committees of conferences in Distributed and Parallel Computing and on the Steering Committees of DISC and PODC. In 2015 he served as the General Chair of PODC 2015 and this year he is co-chairing the Self-Stabilization Track of SSS 2017.

 

Date: 2016-Dec-14     Time: 15:00:00     Room: 336

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