Keynote Speakers

Mike Edmunds is Emeritus Professor of Astrophysics at Cardiff University and former Head of the School of Physics and Astronomy. He was educated at Cambridge, but has lived and worked in Wales for over 35 years. His main research career involved the determination and interpretation of the abundances of the chemical elements in the Universe, and investigation of the origin of interstellar dust. Later work has partly focused on the history of astronomy, and on Science in Society activity. Mike is Chair the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, Chair of the Astronomical Heritage Committee of the Royal Astronomical Society, a former member of two UK Research Councils (the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council and the Science and Technology Facilities Council), and can occasionally be seen in his one-man play about Newton "Sir Isaac Remembers...". (Source)

Talk abstract:

Perhaps the most extraordinary surviving relic from the ancient Greek world is a device containing over thirty gear wheels dating from the 1st century B.C., and now known as the Antikythera Mechanism. This device is an order of magnitude more complicated than any surviving mechanism from the following millennium, and there is no known precursor. It is clear from its structure and inscriptions that its purpose was astronomical calculation, including eclipse prediction. In this illustrated talk, I will outline the results from the international Antikythera Mechanism Research Project which has been using modern imaging methods to probe the structure and function of the device and its inscriptions. Our results show the extraordinary sophistication of the Mechanism's design. But when and where were more general mechanical calculators developed? I will briefly trace the evidence from the Middle Ages, through Kepler, Pascal and Babbage and on to the emergence of widespread mechanical calculation in the 19th century and the triumph of true computers in the 20th century. I'll try and answer the inevitable question - why did it take so long?

The presentation slides can be downloaded here.

Keynote 2: Professor Nitin H. Vaidya

Title: Resilient Distributed Consensus

Time: 10th June 14:30 – 15:30

Location: Medical and Biological Sciences Building - Main Auditorium

Nitin Vaidya received the Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He has held visiting positions at the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, Microsoft Research, and Sun Microsystems, as well as a faculty position at the Texas A&M University. He co-authored papers that received awards at the 1998 ACM MobiCom, 2007 ACM MobiHoc, and several other conferences. Nitin Vaidya is an IEEE Fellow, and a recipient of a CAREER award from the U.S. National Science Foundation. He has served as Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and Editor-in-Chief for ACM SIGMOBILE publication MC2R. (Source)

Talk abstract:

Consensus algorithms allow a set of nodes to reach an agreement on a quantity of interest. For instance, a consensus algorithm may be used to allow a network of sensors to determine the average value of samples collected by the different sensors. Similarly, a consensus algorithm can also be used by the nodes to synchronize their clocks. Research on consensus algorithms has a long history, with contributions from different research communities, including distributed computing, control systems, and social science.

In this talk, we will discuss two resilient consensus algorithms that can perform correctly despite the following two types of adversities: (i) In wireless networks, transmissions are subject to transmission errors, resulting in packet losses. We will discuss how "average consensus" can be achieved over such lossy links, without explicitly making the links reliable, for instance, via retransmissions. (ii) In a distributed setting, some of the nodes in the network may fail or may be compromised. We will discuss a consensus algorithm that can tolerate "Byzantine" failures in partially connected networks.

The presentation slides can be downloaded from here.