EECS Seminar: Decentralized and Dispersed Computing for the Internet of Things

Abstract: This talk touches on two different paradigms: decentralized computing, and dispersed computing. The former pertains to applications that can operate across trust boundaries, while the latter is focused on enabling complex applications to be deployed on heterogeneous networked edge and cloud computing resources. I will present results from research at USC touching on these paradigms in the context of the internet of things. Our work on decentralized computing includes a new mobile-oriented blockchain protocol, smart contracts to enable cheat-proof peer-to-peer trading of digital goods and a decentralized review mechanism suitable for data marketplaces. Our work on dispersed computing includes an open-source orchestrator, a fast scheduler that uses graph convolutional networks and a novel adversarial analysis of scheduling algorithms.

Bio: Bhaskar Krishnamachari is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. His research spans the design and evaluation of algorithms and protocols for wireless networks, distributed systems and the internet of things. He is the co-author of more than 300 technical papers and three books, that have been collectively cited more than 34,000 times. He has co-authored papers that have received awards at ACM/IEEE IPSN, ACM Mobicom and IEEE VNC. He is an IEEE Fellow.