April 2, 2020

In order to properly manage the Covid-19 pandemic, governments and the scientists who advise them need the most accurate data...

Despite the hype about blockchains and distributed ledgers, no formal abstraction of these objects has been proposed. To face this issue, in this paper we provide a proper formulation of a distributed ledger object. In brief, we define a ledger object as a sequence of records, and we provide the operations and the properties that such an object should support. 

We consider online task computing environments such as volunteer computing platforms running on BOINC (e.g., SETI@home) and crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We model the computations as an Internet-based task computing system under the master-worker paradigm. A master entity sends tasks across the Internet, to worker entities willing to perform a computational task. 

Everyone is familiar with the problem of online scheduling, even if they are not aware of it; from the way we prioritize our everyday decisions to the way a delivery service must decide on the route to follow in order to cover the ongoing requests. In computer science this is a problem of even greater importance.

Cellular service providers have been struggling with users’ demand since the emergence of mobile Internet. As a result, each generation of cellular network prevailed over its predecessors mainly in terms of connection speed.

Why should I consider a future in research? What sort of opportunities does a PhD open up for me? What makes research in the science of networks such an exciting career choice? How can we ensure that the Internet can grow and adapt to ever-changing needs over the coming decades? What lies beyond the Internet? What inspires network research?

Several members and stakeholders of IMDEA Networks Institute are leading the organization of ACM e-Energy 2014. Marco Ajmone Marsan and Antonio Fernández Anta are both long-standing researchers at the Institute. Two leading international figures in networking research, Jim Kurose from University of Massachusetts at Amherst (USA) and Jon Crowcroft, from University of Cambridge (UK), are both members of IMDEA Networks’ Scientific Council. Ajmone, Fernández Anta, and Kurose are Steering Committee members the ACM e-Energy conference, whereas Crowcroft is the General co-chair of the 2014 edition.

Institute IMDEA Networks annually holds a by-invitation-only thematic workshop in Madrid. The workshop accompanies a meeting of our Scientific Council comprised by prominent researchers. In addition to talks by Scientific Council members, the workshop includes invited talks by external experts in the research theme of the workshop. The goal of the 2012 workshop is to foster discussion on a critical aspect of research in networking: data.

Institute IMDEA Networks annually holds a by-invitation-only thematic workshop in Madrid. The workshop accompanies a meeting of our Scientific Council comprised by prominent researchers. In addition to talks by Scientific Council members, the workshop includes invited talks by external experts in the research theme of the workshop. The 2011 workshop theme is Internet science with a focus on social networking.

Social scientist have traditionally had limited access to data about individuals, like their personality, relationships or tastes. The widespread use of Online Social Networks (OSNs) has changed this drastically, since OSNs provide huge amounts of data to work with.