Alessia Milani

Integrating Privacy into the Foundations of Distributed Computing

Résumé

The cloud has become the dominant infrastructure for modern distributed applications, offering flexible access to large-scale computing and storage resources. At the same time, the widespread deployment of interconnected devices, such as Internet of Things (IoT) systems and smartphones, has led to the continuous collection and processing of massive amounts of sensitive data by distributed applications.

This evolution creates a fundamental tension between the flexibility and scalability provided by cloud infrastructures and the privacy concerns raised by the manipulation of shared data. In this context, it becomes essential to rethink the design of distributed systems by integrating privacy considerations as a central design principle.

In this talk, I will revisit recent notions of privacy introduced in the distributed computing literature. I will then discuss how fundamental distributed computing abstractions can be extended to incorporate privacy requirements, and how these extensions impact the design of distributed algorithms.

Biographie

Alessia Milani is a professor in computer science at Aix-Marseille University and conducts her research within the Distributed ALGOrithms (DALGO) group at LIS.

She earned her PhD in Computer Science in 2007 through a joint program between Sapienza University of Rome and Université de Rennes 1. After her doctorate, she held postdoctoral positions at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and Sorbonne University.

From 2010 to 2021, she was an associate professor at Institut National Polytechnique de Bordeaux, and a member of the LaBRI laboratory.

Her research focuses on the theory of distributed systems, with an emphasis on fault tolerance. She has contributed to research areas including data consistency, transactional memory, fault-tolerant shared objects, and algorithms for dynamic and ad-hoc networks.

Gunes Karabulut Kurt

Vers une connectivité globale intelligente et intégrée par les réseaux stratosphériques et spatiaux

Résumé

Les réseaux spatiaux et stratosphériques, comprenant les satellites en orbite basse (LEO) et les stations de plateforme à haute altitude (HAPS), sont considérés comme ayant le potentiel de connecter le monde entier et de réduire la fracture numérique persistante. Les aspects de communication et de réseau de ces infrastructures non terrestres, ainsi que leur intégration aux réseaux terrestres, seront abordés. Les problèmes de communication et de réseau associés seront examinés, et des solutions potentielles, telles que le MIMO massif distribué, seront présentées. Des questions ouvertes et des pistes de recherche futures seront également exposées en conclusion.

Biographie

Gunes Karabulut Kurt est Chaire de recherche du Canada (Tier 1) en nouvelles frontières des communications spatiales et professeure à Polytechnique Montréal. Elle est directrice du Centre de Recherche Poly-Grames. Gunes est Fellow de Marie Curie, Fellow de l'Académie canadienne du génie (CAE). Elle est titulaire d'un B.S. de l'Université Bogazici (Istanbul), et d'un MASc et d'un Ph.D. en génie électrique de l'Université d'Ottawa.