PMP Winter Colloquia

PMP Students,
 
I am excited to announce the revival of our evening colloquium series
specifically for PMP students!
 
Our next event will be held on Monday, February 26 in the Allen Center
when Tom Anderson from our CSE faculty will present his research group's
analysis of systems like BitTorrent which spurred their development of
BitTyrant http://bittyrant.cs.washington.edu/
<http://bittyrant.cs.washington.edu/> . Professor Anderson's research
has received considerable web press, including a recent slashdotting:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/03/1434259
<http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/03/1434259>
 
This colloquia (which will not be recorded or broadcast) is open only to
PMP students and can definitely count toward your Winter colloquia
reporting. What's more, a delicious complementary dinner will be
available for PMP students that evening beginning at 6:45 pm in the
Atrium. Professor Anderson's colloquia "Do Incentives Build Robustness
in Distributed Systems?" will follow at 7:30 pm. At the conclusion of
the colloquia at 8:30 pm, dessert will be served.
 
The topic is extremely relevant, the dinner and dessert will be
delicious, and the company will be first rate. This is a special event
created to gather all PMP students together in one place at one time.
We would love to see each and every one of you there!--Dave
 
PMP Winter 2007 Colloquia Details
 
When: Monday, February 26, 2007
Dinner: 6:45 pm Allen Center Atrium
Colloquia: 7:30 pm EE1-125 (adjacent lecture hall)
Dessert: 8:30 pm Atrium
 
Colloquium Speaker: Tom Anderson
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/tom/
Title: Do Incentives Build Robustness in Distributed Systems?
Abstract: An emerging paradigm in the design of large scale distributed
systems is to explicitly consider incentives as part of the design. In
this talk, I outline two case studies of the role of incentives in
distributed systems, in BGP and BitTorrent. In the case of BGP, we were
able to show that detour routing inefficiencies in the Internet can be
largely solved by better aligning incentives among ISPs. In the case of
BitTorrent, a system explicitly designed to take incentives into
account, we were able to show that its incentive mechanism can be easily
subverted, that all users have an incentive to subvert the mechanism,
and that the likely end result will be worse performance for all. In
both cases I will outline solutions which are efficient, robust to
incentives, and easy to implement.
 
Received on Wed Jan 24 2007 - 10:34:50 PST