Computer Science Distinguished Seminar
Blockchains and the Future of Distributed Computing
When: Friday, December 06, 2019
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM
Speaker: Dr. Maurice Herlihy, Brown University
Host: Dr. Gopal Pandurangan
There has been a recent explosion of interest in blockchain-based distributed ledger systems such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many others. Much of this work originated outside the distributed computing community, but the questions raised, such as consensus, replication, fault-tolerance, privacy, and security, and so on, are all issues familiar to our community.
This talk surveys the theory and practice of blockchain-based distributed systems from the point of view of classical distributed computing, along with speculation about promising future research directions for the distributed computing community.
Bio:
Maurice Herlihy has an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from M.I.T. He has served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University and the staff of DEC Cambridge Research Lab. He is the recipient of the 2003 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing, the 2004 Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science, the 2008 ISCA influential paper award, the 2012 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, and the 2013 Wallace McDowell award. He received a 2012 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Natural Sciences and Engineering Lecturing Fellowship, and he is fellow of the ACM, a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Arts and Sciences.