Electrical and Computer Engineering Seminar
Joachim Neu
PhD Candidate, Stanford University
Wednesday, April 24, 2024, 10:00-11:00 am
B02 CSL Auditorium or Online via Zoom
Title: Optimal Consensus Among Diverse Clients
Abstract: Consensus theory underpinning the design of distributed systems has a 40+ year history. Blockchains have re-ignited interest in the field as a vital building block for decentralized applications and services that promise egalitarian access and robustness to faults and abuse. An emerging key challenge is to simultaneously serve clients with diverse security requirements. Conceptually, this can be viewed as a consensus analogue of information theory's broadcast channel where multiple users have to be served simultaneously. I present the first protocols that solve this consensus problem optimally in certain settings. Results from this line of work have been adopted in the Ethereum blockchain that powers an ecosystem worth $500bn+.
Joachim Neu is a PhD candidate at Stanford University advised by David Tse. His research focuses on Internet-scale consensus as a key enabler for decentralized systems, and spans distributed systems, probabilistic systems analysis, applied cryptography, and networking/communications. Website: https://www.jneu.net/
