Abstract
The phrase “think global, act local” can be used in various contexts, including information technology and computer science. Thinking globally, but computing locally is an overarching theme in our research group. In my talk I will present a few recent highlights from our research; all of the examples will be connecting to the motto. These examples will be diverse, touching on cyberphysical as well as distributed systems. One topic I am going to discuss is positioning. I will present some of our recent results on how to get more energy efficient, accurate, and fault-tolerant GPS receivers. I will also talk about distributed ledger technology, which turns out to be a perfect example for the motto. Acting locally is mandatory, or a blockchain cannot achieve a high enough throughput in many application areas. Finally, I will also present a one or two local computation theory results, showing the limitations of acting locally. I hope this will be an entertaining talk, with something for everybody.
Biography
Roger Wattenhofer is a full professor at the Information Technology and Electrical Engineering Department, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He received his doctorate in Computer Science from ETH Zurich. He also worked some years at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.
His research interests are a variety of algorithmic and systems aspects in computer science and information technology, e.g., distributed systems, positioning systems, wireless networks, mobile systems, social networks, deep neural networks. He publishes in different communities: distributed computing (e.g., PODC, SPAA, DISC), networking and systems (e.g., SIGCOMM, MobiCom, SenSys, OSDI), and algorithmic theory (e.g., STOC, FOCS, SODA, ICALP). His work received multiple awards, e.g. the Prize for Innovation in Distributed Computing for his work in Distributed Approximation. He published the book “Blockchain Science: Distributed Ledger Technology“, which has been translated to Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese.