Keynotes
Prof Aad van Moorsel
Title: Models for Blockchain and Decentralised Systems
We consider blockchains and other decentralised systems from a performance and dependability engineering perspective. The presentation builds on several keynotes delivered in recent years by the author, which consider blockchain performance engineering in the system layer, the consensus layer and the incentives layer, respectively. In this keynote we provide an overall view on model-based performance and dependability analysis and on the software tools that support such modelling. We also discuss in some more detail the BlockSim simulation tool, recent model-based analysis results for the Verifier’s Dilemma and concerns for other emerging decentralised and distributed systems, including those for federated learning.
Bio:
Aad van Moorsel is a Chair in Decentralised Systems and Head of the School of Computer Science at University of Birmingham as well as Director of the institute of Interdisciplinary Data Science and AI in Birmingham and Turing Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. His research group at University of Birmingham conducts research in security, privacy and trust, with applications in payment, trustworthy AI, blockchain and smart systems. The group’s research contains elements of quantification, be it through system measurement, predictive modelling or on-line adaptation. Aad worked in industry from 1996 until 2003, first as a researcher at Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill and then as a research manager at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, both in the United States. He got his PhD in computer science from Universiteit Twente in The Netherlands and has a Masters in mathematics from Universiteit Leiden, also in The Netherlands. After finishing his PhD he was a postdoc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA, for two years. He is the author of over 200 peer-reviewed research papers and holds three US patents.
Prof Maria Papadopouli
Title: Identifying Neuronal Modules of Communication in Primary Visual Cortex
Bio:
Maria Papadopouli (Ph.D. Columbia University, October 2002) is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Crete, a Research Associate at the Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, and a Fulbright Scholar. She has been a visiting Professor at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School (2022-2023), the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT (2017), and at the School of Electrical Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. From July 2002 until 2006, she was a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) (on leave from July 2004 until June 2006. Her research has been supported by several awards (e.g., IBM Faculty Awards, Google Faculty Award, Comcast Innovation Fund. and competitive national, EU, and international grants. She has been selected in the N2Women Stars in Networking and Communications in 2021.
