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Colourful Tales of Colourless Tasks

Leqi (Jimmy) Zhu, Canadian Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Award Winner 2019

The Canadian Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Award was presented to Leqi Zhu for his thesis On the Space Complexity of Colourless Tasks. 

This thesis comprises some of the most significant research results in the last decade in the area of distributed computing and was recognized as perhaps the most important thesis in the field of distributed computing since the thesis of Jim Aspnes about 27 years ago. It contains several lower bounds to long-standing open problems in Distributed Computing, and introduces several new proof techniques that are certain to have a continuing effect on the field.

The main focus of the thesis was to prove lower bounds on the amount of shared memory needed for a collection of asynchronous processes to solve certain simple, yet fundamental, distributed computing tasks ("colourless" tasks).  This talk will focus on some interesting stories behind the main results of the thesis and what they meant to the author, who hopes to give the viewer a (pleasant) taste of distributed computing and some of its interesting open questions along the way.

Leqi Zhu is currently a Research Fellow in the EECS department at the University of Michigan, working with Professor Seth Pettie.  He obtained his PhD and MSc from the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Professor Faith Ellen, and his BMath from the University of Waterloo.