Apologies for duplicate emails.

Two PhD positions in distributed computing are open at Telecom Paris.


RESEARCH TOPIC

Large-scale distributed storage systems play an important role in the modern world, and their consistent and efficient operation is crucial. 
The prominent blockchain technology aims at implementing a public ”ledger”: a decentralized consistent history of transactions proposed by an open set of participating processes, with no static membership. In a static or properly reconfigurable system, the problem is typically solved using consensus-based state-machine replication algorithms, such as Paxos or PBFT. The crucial innovation of the Bitcoin protocol and its successors was to achieve strong consistency in the face of an adversary that can impersonate an arbitrary number of identities. The resulting protocols are, however, notoriously slow and energy-demanding, and an immediate question is whether these costs are unavoidable.

We intend to focus on consistency and scalablility of compositions of blockchain-like systems.  We intend to characterize the model assumptions that enable generic blockchain interactions in a consortium or an open system. We also plan to explore the space of consistency definitions that enable generalizations of  "cross-chain" transactions. Besides establishing provable complexity and computability bounds, the project intends to develop system prototypes that are not only formally proved correct but also studied experimentally.

More details: https://perso.telecom-paris.fr/kuznetso/beco-phd.pdf

LOCATION

Located in the Paris area,Telecom Paris (formerly known as ENST or École nationale supérieure des télécommunications) is one of the top French public institutions of higher education and research (Grandes Écoles), a founding member of Institut Polytechnique Paris. In collaboration with EPFL, it has established Institut Eurécom at Sophia-Antipolis.

ELIGIBILITY and FORMALITIES

The positions are open for three years starting in 2019-2020.

The positions are offered to both foreign and French students who hold a Master degree in computer science. Solid mathematical background, basic knowledge of distributed algorithms, basic concurrent programming skills, curiosity, persistence and taste for challenging problems are expected.


APPLICATION PROCESS

To apply, please send the following documents:

- Curriculum Vitae
- Transcripts of undergraduate university grades
- Motivation letter from the applicant

to Petr Kuznetsov ([log in to unmask])