COMPUTER SYSTEMS

PI:   Nuno Preguiça

• The Computer Systems (CS) group addresses security, reliability, and performance of computer systems, regularly publishing in top venues including VLDB*, CCS*, Usenix ATC, CRYPTO*, EuroCrypt*, OOPSLA, ICDE*, and TCC. Contributions in distributed data management and decentralized systems are internationally recognized, with industry adoption in systems serving millions of users. Activities include: IETF standardization, contributions to the Tor system, and national cybersecurity initiatives participation.
  
  The CS group will address challenges related to distributed system complexity and scale, focusing on emerging and future infrastructures/architectures. In particular, we will contribute to answer the following research questions:
  
  How can seamless privacy and security technologies be developed to address the growing importance of privacy and security in society? Can these technologies avoid compromising usability and performance of systems? How can we prepare to protect privacy and privacy in the post-quantum computing world? Can privacy be ensured for AI systems while maintaining their functionality and performance?
• How can distributed and parallel architectures be unified to address the emerging challenges posed by the increasing scale and complexity of modern distributed systems? In particular: How to streamline data access in this context? How to minimize synchronization overhead? How to optimize computations over partitioned data? How can transactional data access be improved to ensure consistency and reliability?
  
  What novel building blocks are needed to accommodate the expansion of computer infrastructures to the edge and their transition towards decentralized, highly heterogeneous swarm-like intelligent systems? Can we develop secure and scalable communication primitives? What data management schemes should be used? How to effectively support local-first software in decentralized settings?