The GI 2021 was held in conjunction with IEEE INFOCOM 2021. The paper submissions for GI 2021 have a good balance of countries and locations, and basically, most of them have high qualities. All the papers went through a rigorous review process and finally 18 papers have been accepted. The statistics of GI 2021 is provided as follows.
Keynote Session 1: Frontiers in Networking
Vincent Chan (MIT, USA)
Abstract:
Future networks with orders of magnitude increase in data rates and large granularity bursty traffic need an architecture with high efficiency and also adapt dynamically to fluctuating offered loads and rapidly changing networks states. Moreover, applications and computing will impose new requirements on the network infrastructure such as time deadlines. The current network management and control systems only adapt quasi-statically (from minutes to days) due the smoothing effects of significant statistical multiplexing of traffic. Future networks will see increase in demands mostly due to large granularity sessions. These granular sessions present large dynamic range and bursty offered traffic to the network, resulting in unpredictable congestions and blocking. We will explore efficient and agile network algorithms to adapt quickly to changing network conditions: a cognitive network management and control system resides in the network control plane as a collection of coordinated algorithms that sense and infer network states, decide and implement fast scheduling of flows, predict intention of users/applications and take appropriate actions, perform rapid load balancing, and handle resiliency via reconfiguration, restoration and reconstitution of failed network assets.
Short Bio:
Vincent Chan, the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Professor of EECS, MIT, received his BS(71), MS(71), EE(72), and Ph.D.(74) degrees in EE from MIT. From 1974 to 1977, he was an assistant professor, EE, at Cornell University. He joined MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1977 and had been Division Head of the Communications and Information Technology Division until becoming the Director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (1999–2007). In July 1983, he initiated the Laser Intersatellite Transmission Experiment Program and the follow-on GeoLITE Program. In 1989, he formed and chaired the All-Optical-Network Consortium among MIT, AT&T and DEC, the Next Generation Internet Consortium, ONRAMP among AT&T, Cabletron, MIT, Nortel and JDS, and a Satellite Networking Research Consortium formed between MIT, Motorola, Teledesic and Globalstar. He chaired the Defense Science Board Task Force on Defense Communications, Networks and Satellite Communications and the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Advisory Committee. He also has been active with start-ups and was a Board Member of a Fortune-500 network company and a member of the Draper Corporation. After chairing the Strategic Planning Committee of ComSoc from 2018-2019, he is serving as the President of the IEEE Communication Society since January 2020.
Keynote Session 2: Blockchain Security and Consensus Protocols
Wenjing Lou (Virginia Tech, USA)
Abstract:
Blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin, has emerged as a “secure by design” technology, showing great potential to enable a wide range of decentralized secure applications across a broad spectrum of industries. However, the security of blockchain is largely depending on a threshold assumption. Using the Bitcoin network as an example, a fundamental assumption is that the network is secure as long as adversaries cannot control more than 50% of the network’s gross computing power. In this talk, we will focus on the proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain consensus protocols and examine some fundamental security properties of blockchain. We show that while blockchain promises decentralization, irreversible record keeping, public verifiability, transparency, and user anonymity, etc., these security properties do not come for free and they are not guaranteed. Excessive overhead and performance deficits may place a fundamental limit on the use of blockchain in many applications. We also show that factors, such as mining strategies and network connectivity, could significantly reduce the fundamental 50% threshold value of blockchain security.
Short Bio:
Wenjing Lou is the W. C. English Endowed Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech and a Fellow of the IEEE. She holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Florida. Her research interests cover many topics in the cybersecurity field, with her current research interest focusing on wireless networks, privacy protection in machine learning systems, and security and privacy problems in the Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Prof. Lou is a highly cited researcher by the Web of Science Group. She received the Virginia Tech Alumni Award for Research Excellence in 2018, which is the highest university level faculty research award. She received the INFOCOM Test-of-Time paper award in 2020. She is the TPC chair for IEEE INFOCOM 2019 and ACM WiSec 2020. She was the Steering Committee Chair for IEEE CNS conference from 2013 to 2020. She is currently a steering committee member of IEEE INFOCOM and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. She served as a program director at US National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2014 to 2017.
Lightning Talks
Filecoin: A Token-based, Decentralised Storage Network
Yiannis Psaras (Protocol Labs, USA)
[Report submitted by Co-Chairs GI 2021]