From Gossip to Voting

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• Professor Patrick Thiran, EPFL
• Friday 16 May 2014, 14:30-15:30
• EEE Department, Control Seminar Room, Level 11, Room 1109A.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Kin K Leung.

The speaker will be available in the afternoon of May 16. Please contact Kin Leung if you would like to meet with the speaker.

Abstract: An increasingly larger number of applications require networks to perform decentralized computations over distributed data. A representative problem of these “in-network processing” tasks is the distributed computation of the average of values present at nodes of a network, known as gossip algorithms. They have received recently significant attention across different communities (networking, algorithms, signal processing, control) because they constitute simple and robust methods for distributed information processing over networks. The first part of this lecture is a survey some results on real-valued (analog) gossip algorithms. The second part is devoted to quantized gossip on arbitrary connected networks, and to a particular instance of this problem, the voting problem: nodes initially vote for Yes (1) or No (0), and they want to know the majority opinion. We show that the majority voting problem is solvable with only 2 bits of memory per agent. (This is a joint work with Florence Bénézit and Martin Vetterli.)

Bio: Patrick Thiran received the electrical engineering degree from the Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 1989, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1990, and the Ph.D. degree from EPFL , Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1996. He is a Professor at EPFL . He became an Adjunct Professor in 1998, an Assistant Professor in 2002, an Associate Professor in 2006 and a Full Professor in 2011. From 2000 to 2001, he was with Sprint Advanced Technology Labs, Burlingame, CA. His research interests include communication networks, performance analysis, dynamical systems, and stochastic models. He is currently active in the analysis and design of wireless networks, in network measurements, and in data-driven network science. He served as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems in 1997-99 and for the IEEE /ACM Transactions on Networking in 2006-10. He is currently on the editorial board of the IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communication. He is/was on the program committee of different conferences in networking, including Sigcomm, CoNext, Sigmetrics, IMC , CoNext and Infocom. He is a Fellow of the IEEE . He received the 1996 EPFL Doctoral Prize and the 2008 Crédit Suisse Teaching Award.

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