SCS Distinguished Lecture: Nitin Vaidya

Speaker: Nitin Vaidya, professor at Georgetown University 

Date and Time: Nov. 13 at 11 a.m.

Location: KACB 2443

Title: Distributed Optimization and Consensus in the Presence of Adversarial Agents 

Abstract: Due to their many potential applications, there is a rich history of research on distributed consensus and distributed optimization. Distributed consensus requires the agents in the system to reach agreement on an output as a function of the inputs of the various agents. Distributed optimization requires the agents to collaboratively optimize a global cost function that consists of the summation of the local cost functions of the individual agents. Loss minimization in machine learning is a special case of this problem, and it has many other applications as well. The problems of consensus and optimization are inter-related, with some commonalities in the solutions used for these problems.

In this talk, we will consider the above two problems in the presence of adversarial agents. The adversarial agents may misbehave and attempt to tamper with the outcome of the distributed computation. Such adversarial behavior may occur due to security compromise of the agents or due to software/hardware failure. We will take an overview of some recent results on the above two problems, with an intuitive presentation of the proposed solutions.

The talk will NOT assume any distributed computing background from the audience.

Bio: Nitin Vaidya is the Robert L. McDevitt, K.S.G., K.C.H.S. and Catherine H. McDevitt L.C.H.S. Chair Professor Computer Science at Georgetown University, where he served as the Department Chair during 2018-24. His current research interests are in the area of distributed algorithms, and previously he has worked on wireless networks. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He previously served as a Professor and Associate Head in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has co-authored papers that received awards at several conferences, including SSS, ACM MobiHoc and ACM MobiCom. He is a fellow of the IEEE. He has served as the Chair of the Steering Committee for the ACM PODC conference, as the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and as the Editor-in-Chief for ACM SIGMOBILE publication MC2R.