Keynote Speakers:

  • Andrea W. Richa, Arizona State University (ASU), USA
  • Biography:

    Andrea W. Richa was inducted as 2022 President's Professor at Arizona State University (ASU), one of the most prestigious faculty honors bestowed by the university. She is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the School for Computing and Augmented Intelligence (SCAI) and an associate faculty at the Center for Bio-computing, Security and Society at the Biodesign Institute at ASU. She recently served as SCAI's Interim Associate Director. Her main areas of expertise are in distributed and network algorithms and computing in general. More recently, she has focused on developing the algorithmic foundations on what has been coined as programmable matter, through her work on self-organizing particle systems (SOPS). Her work has been widely cited, and includes, besides SOPS, work on bio-inspired distributed algorithms, distributed load balancing, packet routing, wireless network modeling and topology control, wireless jamming, data mule networks, underwater optical networking, and distributed hash tables (DHTs). She received the 2024 ASU Fulton Undergraduate Research Initiative Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award, the 2021 ASU Faculty Women Association Outstanding Mentor Award and the 2017 SCAI Best Senior Researcher award. She is currently the recipient of a DoD MURI award and was the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, among others; she was also the keynote speaker and program and general chair of several prestigious conferences. For more on her work and that of her students, please check http://sops.engineering.asu.edu .

  • Title: Algorithmic Programmable Matter: From Local Markov Chains to "Dumb" Robots
  • Abstract:

    Many programmable matter systems have been developed, including modular and swarm robotics, synthetic biology, DNA tiling, and smart materials. We describe programmable matter as an abstract collection of simple computational elements (particles) with limited memory that each execute distributed, local algorithms to self-organize and solve system-wide problems, such as movement, reconfiguration, and coordination. Self-organizing particle systems (SOPS) have many interesting potential applications like coating objects for monitoring and repair purposes, and forming nano-scale devices for surgery and molecular-scale electronic structures. We describe some of our work on the algorithmic foundations of programmable matter, investigating how macro-scale system behaviors can naturally emerge from local micro-behaviors by individual particles: We utilize tools from statistical physics and Markov chain analysis to translate Markov chains defined at a system level into distributed, local algorithms for SOPS that drive the desired emergent collective behavior for the problems of compression, separation, and foraging, among others. We further establish the notion of algorithmic matter, where we leverage standard binary computation, as well as physical characteristics of the robots and interactions with the environment in order to implement our micro-level algorithms in actual testbeds composed of robots that are not capable of any standard computation. We conclude by addressing full concurrency and asynchrony in SOPS.

  • Gregory Chockler, University of Surrey, UK
  • Biography:

    Gregory Chockler is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Surrey, UK. He received B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1993, 1997, and 2003, respectively. His previous positions include Research Staff Member at IBM Research and Professor of Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has held postdoctoral and visiting scientist positions at MIT, EPFL, KTH, SICS, Emory University, IBM, and IMDEA Software Institute. Prof. Chockler's research interests encompass all areas of distributed and concurrent systems, spanning both theory and practice. His work focuses on the foundations of reliable computing in a variety of adversarial settings, including both benign and malicious (Byzantine) failure models. More recently, he has been interested in foundational and systems engineering questions arising in systems enhanced with advanced hardware technologies, such as persistent memory, trusted execution environments, RDMA, and CXL. Prof. Chockler's research has been funded by grants from EPSRC, the Royal Society, and EU Horizon programs, as well as faculty awards from Facebook, IBM, and Stellar Development Foundation. His work at IBM Research received several Outstanding Technical Achievement and Scientific Accomplishment awards for its contribution to large-scale distributed infrastructure and cloud computing projects. He is a recipient of 4 best paper awards (DISC, OPODIS, ACM Middleware), ACM DEBS Most Influential Paper award, and co-inventor of 10 patents. He has served as program and general chair of several premier conferences, and was a member of the editorial board of Information Processing Letters.

  • Title: Reliable Distributed Computing with Emerging Hardware Technologies
  • Abstract:

    I will discuss our recent work on leveraging emerging hardware technologies—persistent memory, trusted execution environments (TEEs), and RDMA—to build more reliable and efficient distributed systems. I will focus on the problem of data durability across two key scenarios: a standalone multicore machine equipped with persistent memory, and distributed message-passing systems operating in adversarial settings. Our work spans theoretical analysis and practical system implementations, revealing both opportunities and limitations of these technologies. I will discuss the technical challenges we encountered when integrating these hardware features, share insights from our implementation experiences, and outline directions for future research.

Invited Talks:

  • Panagiota Fatourou, University of Crete, Greece
  • Title: Lock-Free Augmented Trees
  • Abstract:

    Augmenting an existing sequential data structure with extra information to support greater functionality is a widely used technique. For example, search trees are augmented to build sequential data structures like order-statistic trees, interval trees, tango trees, link/cut trees and many others. We study how to design concurrent augmented tree data structures. We present a new, general technique that can augment a lock-free tree to add any new fields to each tree node, provided the new fields' values can be computed from information in the node and its children. This enables the design of lock-free, linearizable analogues of a wide variety of classical augmented data structures. As a first example, we give a wait-free trie that stores a set S of elements drawn from {1, ... ,N} and supports linearizable order-statistic queries such as finding the kth smallest element of S. Updates and queries take O(log N) steps. We also apply our technique to a lock-free binary search tree (BST), where changes to the structure of the tree make the linearization argument more challenging. Our augmented BST supports order statistic queries in O(h) steps on a tree of height h. The augmentation does not affect the asymptotic running time of the updates. For both our trie and BST, we give an alternative augmentation to improve searches and order-statistic queries to run in O(log |S|) steps (with a small increase in step complexity of updates). As an added bonus, our technique supports arbitrary multi-point queries (such as range queries) with the same time complexity as they would have in the corresponding sequential data structure.

  • Rotem Oshman, Tel Aviv University, Israel
  • Title: Reliable Distributed Computing with Emerging Hardware Technologies
  • Abstract:

    I will discuss our recent work on leveraging emerging hardware technologies—persistent memory, trusted execution environments (TEEs), and RDMA—to build more reliable and efficient distributed systems. I will focus on the problem of data durability across two key scenarios: a standalone multicore machine equipped with persistent memory, and distributed message-passing systems operating in adversarial settings. Our work spans theoretical analysis and practical system implementations, revealing both opportunities and limitations of these technologies. I will discuss the technical challenges we encountered when integrating these hardware features, share insights from our implementation experiences, and outline directions for future research.

  • Siddhartha Jayanti, Dartmouth College, USA
  • Title: Some Practical and Impactful Multiprocessor Algorithms

Discussion Panel:

  • Title: New Models, New Realities: The Future of Distributed Algorithms
  • Panel members: Marcos Aguilera, Gregory Chockler, Themis Palpanas, Michel Raynal, and Andrea Richa.

Invited Papers:

  • Abdulfatah Bahbouh and Ishfaq Ahmad (University of Texas at Arlington, USA)
    Rethinking Benchmarks for Parallel Machine Learning Techniques: Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Evaluation Metrics
  • Anya Chaturvedi, Andréa Richa, Peter Vargas (Arizona State University, USA)
    Synchronization in Anonymous Networks Under Continuous Dynamics
  • Michel Raynal (IRISA, France) and Gadi Taubenfeld (Reichman University, Israel)
    Full Anonymity in Read/Write and Read/Modify/Write Distributed Computing

Invited Papers:

  • Hillel-Avni, Shir Buchner, Shlomi Dolev, Moti Yung (Ben-Gurion University and Google, Israel)
    AHB: Post Quantum Ad Hoc Blockchain for Private Barter
  • Miguel Piña and Armando Castañeda (UNAM, Mexico)
    Modular Baskets Queue
  • Sergey Egorov, Gregory Chockler, Brijesh Dongol, Dan O'Keeffe (University of Surrey and Royal Holloway, UK)
    Fast Durably Linearizable Data Structures for Free