Consensus and its variants, including set agreement and approximate agreement, play a central role in our understanding of asynchronous shared memory distributed computing. I will discuss some classical and recent results about these problems, including algorithms, hierarchies, impossibility results, and space complexity lower bounds.
Bio
Faith Ellen is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and is currently serving as the Associate Chair, Graduate Students, in the Department of Computer Science. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1982. Her research interests span the theory of distributed computing, complexity theory and data structures. From 1997 to 2001, she was vice chair of SIGACT, the leading international society for theory of computation and, from 2006 to 2009, she was chair of the steering committee for PODC, the top international conference for theory of distributed computing. In 2014, she co-authoured the book, "Impossibility Results for Distributed Computing". Faith is a Fellow of the ACM.