Publications related to Microsecond Consensus for Microsecond Applications

Planetary-Scale Byzantine Fault Tolerance

The scale and pervasiveness of the Internet make it a pillar of planetary communication, industry and economy, as well as a fundamental medium for public discourse and democratic engagement. In stark contrast with the Internet's decentralized infrastructur ...

EPFL2024

3D diffractive optics for linear interconnects and nonlinear processing

Niyazi Ulas Dinç

The optical domain presents potential avenues for enhancing both computing and communication due to its inherent properties of bandwidth, parallelism, and energy efficiency. This research focuses on harnessing 3-Dimensional (3D) diffractive optics for nove ...

EPFL2024

On the Theory and Practice of Modern Secure Messaging

Daniel Patrick Collins

Billions of people now have conversations daily over the Internet. A large portion of this communication takes place via secure messaging protocols that offer "end-to-end encryption'" guarantees and resilience to compromise like the widely-used Double Ratc ...

EPFL2024

Hypergraph-Based Fast Distributed AC Power Flow Optimization

Colin Neil Jones, Yingzhao Lian, Yuning Jiang, Xinliang Dai

This paper presents a novel distributed approach for solving AC power flow (PF) problems. The optimization problem is reformulated into a distributed form using a communication structure corresponding to a hypergraph, by which complex relationships between ...

IEEE2023

The evolution of behavioral cues and signaling in displaced communication

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller

Displaced communication, whereby individuals communicate regarding a subject that is not immediately present (spatially or temporally), is one of the key features of human language. It also occurs in a few animal species, most notably the honeybee, where t ...

2023

A digital bridge between brain and spinal cord restores walking after paralysis

Grégoire Courtine, Jocelyne Bloch

Spinal-cord injury interrupts communication between the brain and spinal cord, leading to paralysis. An implant that decodes the brain signals that control movements and drives electrical stimulation of the spinal cord re-establishes this communication, en ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2023

Non-verbal Communication between Humans and Robots: Imitation, Mutual Understanding and Inferring Object Properties

Nuno Ricardo Ferreira Duarte

Humans can express their actions and intentions, resorting to verbal and/or non-verbal communication. In verbal communication, humans use language to express, in structured linguistic terms, the desired action they wish to perform. Non-verbal communication ...

EPFL2023

Genomics and conservation: Guidance from training to analyses and applications

Annie Sandrine Guillaume

Environmental change is intensifying the biodiversity crisis and threatening species across the tree of life. Conservation genomics can help inform conservation actions and slow biodiversity loss. However, more training, appropriate use of novel genomic me ...

Wiley2023

Building Strongly-Consistent Systems Resilient to Failures, Partitions, and Slowdowns

Cristina Basescu

Distributed systems designers typically strive to improve performance and preserve availability despite failures or attacks; but, when strong consistency is also needed, they encounter fundamental limitations. The bottleneck is in replica coordination, whi ...

EPFL2023

Byzantine consensus is Θ(n^2): the Dolev-Reischuk bound is tight even in partial synchrony!

Rachid Guerraoui, Seth Gilbert, Vincent Gramoli, Manuel José Ribeiro Vidigueira, Jovan Komatovic, Pierre Philippe Civit

The Dolev-Reischuk bound says that any deterministic Byzantine consensus protocol has (at least) quadratic (in the number of processes) communication complexity in the worst case: given a system with n processes and at most f < n/3 failures, any solution t ...

2023

Exploring Photoredox-Catalyzed (Re)functionalizations with Core-Modified Benziodoxolones

Jérôme Waser, Franck Le Vaillant, Stephanie Grace Elizabeth Amos

Alkynes and nitriles are valuable building blocks in organic synthesis and also have multiple applications in chemical biology and materials science. Due to the high availability of tertiary alcohols, developing methods for their conversion into alkynes an ...

2022

Hybrid Wireless-Local Communication via Information Propagation for Modular Robotic Synchronization Applications

Jamie Paik, Christoph Heinrich Belke, Kevin Andrew Holdcroft, Alexander Thomas Sigrist

Modular robots hold promise of adaptability, robustness, and versatility. Synchronization of modules is critical; if a module is asynchronous, not only will the robot fail to perform tasks properly, but its behavior may be self-destructive through self-col ...

WILEY2022

Effect of Different Communication Affordances on the Emergence of Collaboration Strategies in an Online Multiplayer Game

Pierre Dillenbourg, Hala Khodr, Barbara Bruno, Aditi Kothiyal

In a group, the collective dynamics is governed by the inter- actions between individuals, which can manifest differently depending on the available means of communication. In this paper, we compare 3 conditions of communication affordances (global chat, l ...

Springer2022

Proofs, Circuits, and Communication

Mika Tapani Göös

We survey lower-bound results in complexity theory that have been obtained via newfound interconnections between propositional proof complexity, boolean circuit complexity, and query/communication complexity. We advocate for the theory of total search prob ...

2022

Quantization for Distributed Processing and Learning of Structured Data

Isabela Cunha Maia Nobre

In the domains of machine learning, data science and signal processing, graph or network data, is becoming increasingly popular. It represents a large portion of the data in computer, transportation systems, energy networks, social, biological, and other s ...

EPFL2022

Overcoming decision paralysis—A digital twin for decision making in energy system design

François Maréchal, Tuong-Van Nguyen, Julia Granacher

The design of efficient energy systems, through the development of new technologies and the improvement of current ones, requires the use of rigorous process synthesis methods for generating and analysing design alternatives. We introduce a digital twin of ...

2022

The Gaze Dialogue Model: Nonverbal Communication in HHI and HRI

Aude Billard, José Santos-Victor, Nuno Ricardo Ferreira Duarte

When humans interact with each other, eye gaze movements have to support motor control as well as communication. On the one hand, we need to fixate the task goal to retrieve visual information required for safe and precise action-execution. On the other ha ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022

An Exploratory Study of Reactions to Bot Comments on GitHub

Denis Gillet, Sandy Ingram, Juan Carlos Farah, Xinyang Lu

The widespread use of bots to support software development makes social coding platforms such as GitHub a particularly rich source of data for the study of human-bot interaction. Software development bots are used to automate repetitive tasks, interacting ...

ACM2022

Do Children Adapt Their Perspective to a Robot When They Fail to Complete a Task?

Pierre Dillenbourg, Ana Paiva, Elmira Yadollahi

Spatial understanding and communication are essential skills in human interaction. An adequate understanding of others' spatial perspectives can increase the quality of the interaction, both perceptually and cognitively. In this paper, we take the first st ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2022

Model Predictive Control of Aerial Swarms

Enrica Soria

Aerial robot swarms can have a large socio-economic impact. They can perform time-critical missions faster than a single robot and access dangerous environments without compromising human safety. However, swarm deployment is often limited to free environme ...

EPFL2022