Evolution of the Population Protocol Model

When: Thursday, May 9, 2019
Where: PGH 563
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Dr. James Aspnes, Yale University

Host: Dr. Gopal Pandurangan, University of Houston

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.  In this talk, 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 over the 15 years since it was first proposed, and discuss new problems that have arisen because of this evolution.

Bio:

James Aspnes is a Professor of Computer Science at Yale University.  He received an SB in Mathematics and an SM in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon in 1992.  Before joining the Yale faculty in 1993, he spent a year at IBM Almaden Research Center as a visiting scientist.