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Best Student Paper in Distributed Systems Awarded

Best Student Paper in Distributed Systems Awarded

Henrique Moniz Henrique Moniz, a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Sciences of the Universidade de Lisboa, won the “Best Student Paper” Award, published in the 23 rd International Symposium on Distributed Computing – DISC 2009. This is one of the main international conferences in the area of theoretical distributed computing.

In developing the paper, “Randomization Can Be a Healer: Consensus with Dynamic Omission Failures,” Moniz worked with senior faculty members of the Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa (FCUL) team: Nuno Neves, Miguel Correia, and Paulo Veríssimo. He says that “the paper solves the problem of consensus in environments such as wireless networks where communication fail-ures are ubiquitous.”

“Consensus is a fundamental problem in distributed computing because it allows the nodes that compose the system to agree on a common value,” Moniz explains. “Basically, any kind of coordinated activity can be reduced to consensus.”
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“This contribution is important because it circumvents a 20-year old impossibility result,” says Moniz.
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For the team, this award “confirms previous acknowledgments of the high quality research that has been done for more than two decades, like the 2004 and 2007 IBM awards.” To the student the award “represents recog-nition for the hard work involved in struggling with a problem during approximately a year and a confirmation that it is worth sticking to one’s ideas.” Until recently, Moniz was involved in the dual MSIT-IS professional mas-ter program as a Teaching Assistant.

Check the full paper at: http://homepages.di.fc.ul.pt/%7Enuno/PAPERS/DISC09.pdf