Events

Professor Brian Forrest
Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

There are many challenges to teaching mathematics in a fully online environment. In this talk I will show the important role that assigned work plays in mitigating many of these challenges. I will also speak about how my experience in teaching online has impacted the way in which I approach my on campus courses.

Hemant Saxena, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

We address the problem of discovering dependencies from distributed big data. Existing (non-distributed) algorithms focus on minimizing computation by pruning the search space of possible dependencies. However, distributed algorithms must also optimize data communication costs, especially in current shared-nothing settings. 

Abel Molina, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Yao (1993) proved that quantum Turing machines and uniformly generated quantum circuits are polynomially equivalent computational models: t >= n steps of a quantum Turing machine running on an input of length n can be simulated by a uniformly generated family of quantum circuits with size quadratic in t, and a polynomial-time uniformly generated family of quantum circuits can be simulated by a quantum Turing machine running in polynomial time.

Xinan Yan, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

N. Asokan, Department of Computer Science
Aalto University, Finland

All kinds of previously local services are being moved to cloud settings. While this is justified by the scalability and efficiency benefits of cloud-based services, it also raises new security and privacy challenges. Solving them by naive application of standard security/privacy techniques can conflict with other functional requirements. In this talk, I will outline some cloud-assisted services and the conflicts that arise while trying to secure these services.

Li Liu, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Entanglement is a type of resource used in quantum information theory that gives correlations that cannot be simulated using classical probability theory. It is known that entanglement cannot be created locally. 

Robin Cohen
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Jaemyung Kim, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Transaction durability guarantees the ability to recover committed transactions from failures. However, making every transaction durable impacts transaction processing performance. Some ad-hoc durability mechanisms (e.g., delayed durability) improve performance, but they risk transactions losing their effects due to failures. The current one-size-fits-all transaction durability model does not solve this problem.

John P. Conley, Department of Economics
Vanderbilt University

Blockchains are distributed, immutable, append only, ledgers designed to make trustless interactions between anonymous agents feasible and safe. The ledgers are maintained by networks of independent nodes who process transactions and come to a consensus view of which are valid and how this affects the ledger state. The integrity of blockchain ledgers therefore depends on the incentives contained in the consensus protocols that are designed to make the validating nodes behave honestly.