DSN 2020 propose to attendees the following exciting keynotes:

Keynote #1: Trustworthy AI
Jeannette M. Wing, , Avenessians Director of the Data Science Institute and Professor of Computer Science Columbia University, New York (USA)
June 30 @ 15:15 - 15:55 (CEST)
Keynote session video

Recent years have seen an astounding growth in deployment of AI systems in critical domains such as autonomous vehicles, criminal justice, healthcare, hiring, housing, human resource management, law enforcement, and public safety, where decisions taken by AI agents directly impact human lives. Consequently, there is an increasing concern if these decisions can be trusted to be correct, reliable, fair, and safe, especially under adversarial attacks. How then can we deliver on the promise of the benefits of AI but address these scenarios that have life-critical consequences for people and society? In short, how can we achieve trustworthy AI?
Under the umbrella of trustworthy computing, there is a long-established framework employing formal methods and verification techniques for ensuring trust properties like reliability, security, and privacy of traditional software and hardware systems. Just as for trustworthy computing, formal verification could be an effective approach for building trust in AI-based systems. However, the set of properties needs to be extended beyond reliability, security, and privacy to include fairness, robustness, probabilistic accuracy under uncertainty, and other properties yet to be identified and defined. Further, there is a need for new property specifications and verification techniques to handle new kinds of artifacts, e.g., data distributions, probabilistic programs, and machine learning based models that may learn and adapt automatically over time. This talk will pose a new research agenda, from a formal methods perspective, for us to increase trust in AI systems.

Jeannette M. Wing is Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute and  Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. From 2013 to 2017, she was a Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research. She is Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon where she twice served as the Head of the Computer Science Department and had been on the faculty since 1985. From 2007-2010 she was the Assistant Director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. She received her S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Professor Wing's general research interests are in the areas of trustworthy computing, specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering. Her current interests are in the foundations of security and privacy, with a new focus on trustworthy AI. She was or is on the editorial board of twelve journals, including the Journal of the ACM and Communications of the ACM.

Professor Wing is known for her work on linearizability, behavioral subtyping, attack graphs, and privacy-compliance checkers. Her 2006 seminal essay, titled "Computational Thinking" is credited with helping to establish the centrality of computer science to problem-solving in fields where previously it had not been embraced. She is currently a member of: the National Library of Medicine Blue Ribbon Panel; the Science, Engineering, and Technology Advisory Committee for the American Academy for Arts and Sciences; the Board of Trustees for the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics; the Advisory Board for the Association for Women in Mathematics; and the Alibaba DAMO Technical Advisory Board. She has been chair and/or a member of many other academic, government, and industry advisory boards. She received the CRA Distinguished Service Award in 2011 and the ACM Distinguished Service Award in 2014. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).


Keynote #2: The Journey to Libra Blockchain Core and Beyond
Dahlia Malkhi, Research Lead at Calibra (USA)
July 1 @ 15:00 - 15:40 (CEST)

At the core of cryptoeconomic systems like Libra is a mechanisms for 'agreeing' on a history of payment transactions. The journey to practical and robust solutions is accelerated by the drive to great inclusive financial services. This talk sheds light onto the efforts that led to the design of Libra's blockchain core and provides a glimpse on next steps.

Dahlia Malkhi is an applied and foundational researcher in broad aspects of distributed systems technology. Currently, she is a research lead at Calibra, where she is working on advancing the Libra technology. She is a co-inventor of HotStuff; co-founder and technical lead of VMware blockchain; co-inventor of Flexible Paxos, the technology behind Log Device; creator and tech lead of CorfuDB, a database-less database driving VMware’s NSX-T distributed control plane; and co-inventor of FairPlay project.

Dahlia is an ACM Fellow, 2011. She joined Calibra in June 2019 as a research lead. In 2014, after the closing of the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley lab, she co-founded VMware Research and became a Principal Researcher at VMware until June 2019. From 2004-2014, she was a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley. From 1999-2007, she was a tenured associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and from 1995-1999, a senior researcher at AT&T Labs, NJ.


Keynote #3: Guaranteeing acceptable levels of performability in modern interconnection networks despite congestion
Jose Duato, Member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences and Professor of Computer Architecture, Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain)
July 2 @ 15:15 - 15:55 (CEST)

As the number, variety, and sophistication of Internet applications keeps growing and the number of client requests per time unit keeps increasing, datacenters are adopting hyperscale computing solutions to scale with the demand, and provide appropriate support for interactive services. As system size increases, the cost of the interconnection network grows faster than system size, thus becoming increasingly important to carefully design it to prevent overprovisioning. However, by doing so, the network operation point moves closer to saturation, and sudden traffic bursts may lead to congestion. This situation is aggravated by the recent introduction of flow control in datacenter networks to cope with RDMA requirements. The result is a massive performance degradation whenever some network region becomes congested. Moreover, performance degradation may remain for long even after the traffic bursts that congested the network have already been transmitted. This performance degradation is not compatible with trustworthiness. In this keynote, I will show why congestion appears in an interconnection network, how it propagates, and why performance may degrade so dramatically. Different kinds of congestion will be identified. Also, a global solution to address the congestion problem will be proposed. It consists of several complementary mechanisms that cooperate to address all kinds of congestion and operate at different time scales. Some of these mechanisms have been recently incorporated into commercial products and are being standardized. Keywords: Interconnection network, congestion management, datacenters

Jose Duato is Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering (DISCA) at the Technical University of Valencia (Universitat Politècnica de València). His current research interests include interconnection networks, multicore and multiprocessor architectures, and accelerators for deep learning. He published over 500 refereed papers. According to Google Scholar, his publications received more than 16,000 citations. He proposed a theory of deadlock-free adaptive routing that has been used in the design of the routing algorithms for the Cray T3E supercomputer, the on-chip router of the Alpha 21364 microprocessor, and the IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer. He also developed RECN, a scalable congestion management technique, and a very efficient routing algorithm for fat trees that has been incorporated into Sun Microsystem's 3456-port InfiniBand Magnum switch. Prof. Duato led the Advanced Technology Group in the HyperTransport Consortium, and was the main contributor to the High Node Count HyperTransport Specification 1.0. He also led the development of rCUDA, which enables remote virtualized access to GP-GPU accelerators using a CUDA interface. Prof. Duato is the first author of the book "Interconnection Networks: An Engineering Approach". He also served as a member of the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on Computers, and IEEE Computer Architecture Letters. Prof. Duato was awarded with the National Research Prize in 2009 and the “Rey Jaime I” Prize in 2006. He is a member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences.