DISTINGUISHED ISPA2007 KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Abstract

Many essential fundamental services for networked distributed systems (ad hoc, wireless or sensor) involve maintaining a global predicate over the entire network (defined by some invariance relation on the global state of the network) by using local knowledge at each of the participating nodes. The participating nodes can no longer keep track of even a small fraction of the knowledge about the global network due to limited storage. We need a new paradigm of localized distributed algorithms, where a node takes simple actions based on local knowledge of only its immediate neighbors and yet the system achieves a global objective. Self-stabilization is a relatively new paradigm for designing such localized distributed algorithms for networks; it is an optimistic way of looking at system fault tolerance and scalable coordination; it provides a cost effective built-in safeguard against transient failures that might corrupt data in a distributed system. We introduce self-stabilizing protocol design with the example of a total dominating set in a network graph and discuss some open problems.

Brief Biography

Pradip K Srimani is a professor computer science at Clemson University, South Carolina (he was department chair between August 2000 and December 2006). He had previously served the faculty of Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, Gesselschaft fuer Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung, Bonn, West Germany, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, India, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois, Colorado State University in Ft. Collins, Colorado and University of Technology, Compiegne, France. He received his Ph. D. degree in Radio Physics & Electronics from University of Calcutta, Calcutta, India in 1978.

He has authored/co-authored more than 200 papers in journals and conferences and edited two books for IEEE Computer Society Press. He had served in the past as Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Computer Society Press and as a member of the Editorial Boards of IEEE Software, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and Parallel Computing. He has served as a Distinguished Visiting Speaker and Chapter Tutorial Speaker for IEEE Computer Society for the past several years. He has guest edited special issues for IEEE Trans. Comput., IEEE Trans. Software Eng., Parallel Computing, IEEE Computer, Software, Journal of Computer & Software Engineering, Journal of Systems Software, VLSI Design, International Journal of Systems Science etc. He has served on the national IEEECS/ACM task force on curriculum design for computer science and computer engineering He has also served many conferences in various capacities as program chair, general chair and tutorial speaker. Currently, he serves as a Commissioner of Computing Accreditation Commission of ABET and the editorial boards of IEEE Trans. Parallel & Distributed Systems and International Journal of Sensor Networks.  He is a Fellow of IEEE.