Keynote Speaker:

  • Christian Cachin, University of Bern, Switzerland

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  • Biography:

    Christian Cachin is a professor of computer science at the University of Bern (Switzerland), where he has been leading the Cryptology and Data Security Research Group since 2019. Over his career he worked for IBM Research - Zurich during more than 20 years and has also held visiting positions at MIT, EPFL, and Stanford University. He is an IACR Fellow, ACM Fellow, and IEEE Fellow, recipient of multiple IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards, and has also served as the President of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) from 2014-2019.

    With a background in cryptography, he is interested in all aspects of security in distributed systems and especially in cryptographic protocols, consistency, consensus, blockchains, and cloud-computing security. He is known for developing cryptographic protocols, particularly for achieving consensus and for executing distributed cryptographic operations over the Internet. In the area of cloud computing, he has contributed to standards in storage security and developed protocols for key management.

    He has co-authored a textbook on distributed computing titled Introduction to Reliable and Secure Distributed Programming. While at IBM Research he made essential contributions to the development of Hyperledger Fabric, a blockchain platform aimed at business use.

  • Title:Consensus in Blockchains: Theory and Practice
  • Abstract:

    Reaching consensus despite faulty or corrupted nodes is a central question in distributed computing; it has received renewed attention over the last years because of its importance for cryptocurrencies and blockchain networks. Modern consensus protocols in this space have relied on a number of different methods for the nodes to influence protocol decisions. Such assumptions include (1) traditional voting, where each node has one vote, (2) weighted voting, where voting power is proportional to stake in an underlying asset, and (3) proof-of-X, which demonstrates a cryptographically verifiable investment of a resource X, such as storage space, time waited, or computational work.

    This talk will first give an overview of blockchain consensus methods. Then it presents recent results on the "Snow" consensus protocol family, which is used by the Avalanche blockchain. Avalanche and its AVAX token are among the top-10 of all cryptocurrencies today. Snow consensus differs from all other protocols used in cryptocurrencies and has strong connections to consensus dynamics, a research question analyzed earlier in the theory of distributed computing.

    This talk is based on joint work with Ignacio Amores Sesar and Philipp Schneider.


Invited Papers:

Regular Papers:

  • Blockchain Governance and Liquid Democracy - Quantifying Decentralization in Gitcoin and Internet Computer, Stefan Schmid (TU Berlin) and Dmitry Shestakov (TU Berlin).
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  • Causal Mutual Byzantine Broadcast, M. Féry (LS2N/Nantes Université, France), V. Kowalski (LS2N/Nantes Université, France), F. Monsion (LS2N/Nantes Université, France), A. Mostefaoui (LS2N/Nantes Université, France), S. Pénault (LS2N/Nantes Université, France), M. Perrin (LS2N/Nantes Université, France), and G. Poignant (LS2N/Nantes Université, France).
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  • DeepSLOs for the Computing Continuum, Victor Casamayor Pujol (TU Wien), Boris Sedlak (TU Wien), Yanwei Xu (TU Wien), Praveen Kumar Donta (TU Wien), and Schahram Dustdar (TU Wien).
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  • A Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit Approach for Stochastic Facility Allocation Problem, Abdalaziz Sawwan (Temple University) and Jie Wu (Temple University).
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Short research statements:

    • Blockchains made Lightweight: A Median Rule for State Machine Replication, Jinfeng Dou (Paderborn University) and Christian Scheideler (Paderborn University).
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    • Safety Assistance Systems for Bicyclists: Toward Empirical Studies of the Dooring Problem, Lukas Stratmann (TU Berlin), Ngoc Chi Banh (Paderborn University), Ingrid Scharlau (Paderborn University), and Falko Dressler (TU Berlin, Germany).
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    Peer-reviewed Papers:

    Regular Papers:

    • Snapshotting Mechanisms for Persistent Memory-Mapped Files, Mohammad Moridi (University of Waterloo) and Wojciech Golab (University of Waterloo).
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    • The Next 700 Benchmarking Frameworks for Concurrent Data Structures, Ravil Galiev (ITMO University), Michael Spear (Lehigh University), and Vitaly Aksenov (City, University of London).
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    • New Problems in Distributed Inference for DNN Models on Robotic IoT, Zekai Sun (The University of Hong Kong), Xiuxian Guan (The University of Hong Kong), Junming Wang (The University of Hong Kong), Fangming Liu (Peng Cheng Laboratory, and Huazhong University of Science and Technology), and Heming Cui (The University of Hong Kong).
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    Short research statements:

    • Tracing the Latencies of Ares: A DSM Case Study, Chryssis Georgiou (University of Cyprus), Nicolas Nicolaou (Algolysis Ltd, Cyprus), and Andria Trigeorgi (University of Cyprus & Algolysis Ltd, Cyprus).
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    • The Illusive Failure-Atomic Double-Width Compare-And-Swap, Ahmed Fahmy (University of Waterloo), Adrian Jendo (University of Waterloo), and Wojciech Golab (University of Waterloo).
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    • OCC Pinning: Optimizing Concurrent Computations through Thread Pinning, Brahmaiah Gandham (Mahindra University) and Praveen Alapati (Mahindra University).
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    • Research Summary: Enhancing Localization, Selection, and Processing of Data in Vehicular Cyber-Physical Systems, Bastian Havers (Chalmers University of Technology and Volvo Car Corporation), Marina Papatriantafilou (Chalmers University of Technology), and Vincenzo Gulisano (Chalmers University of Technology).
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