Nitin Vaidya

Brief Biography

Nitin Vaidya is the McDevitt Chair of Computer Science at Georgetown University since July 2018. He received Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He previously served as an Associate Head and Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He has co-authored papers that received awards at several conferences. He is a fellow of the IEEE. He has served as the Chair of the Steering Committee for the ACM PODC conference, as the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and as the Editor-in-Chief for ACM SIGMOBILE publication MC2R.

Distributed Computing (DISC) Group

My group addresses challenges in distributed computing with an emphasis on design and analysis of distributed algorithms. Ongoing research addresses the following problems:

Robust distributed optimization and machine learning: Multi-agent distributed optimization has many applications. In recent year, its application in the context of machine learning has received significant attention. We are exploring three research directions in this context: (i) making distributed optimization and learning robust to tampering of data and communication during training, (ii) privacy-preserving optimization and machine learning, and (iii) making machine learning robust to adversarial examples.
Distributed shared memory systems: Distributed shared memory abstractions are useful to implement inter-process communication and coordination in a distributed setting. Key-value stores that are in common use today provide such an abstraction. A consistency model specifies the behavior of the distributed shared memory as observed by the processes, and different consistency models are often desired in different contexts. In our work, we are exploring consistency models for emerging applications such social networking and distributed robotics. Our interest is in identifying suitable algorithms for achieving the desired notions of consistency, designing algorithms that implement useful primitives on top of these consistency models, and debugging of programs under different consistency models.
Distributed fault-tolerant algorithms: In a distributed systems, node may crash or be compromised, leading to incorrect behavior. A goal of our research is to design distributed algorithms for coordination that tolerate such failures.
Distributed computation over wireless networks: We are exploring performance of distributed computations over wireless networks, exploiting the (lossy) broadcast property of the wireless channel. Our past work in this area has included design of algorithms for distribute consensus, distributed optimization, distributed mutual exclusion, and leader election in wireless networks.

Openings

I am looking to add graduate students & a post-doc to my research group. If interested, please e-mail your vitae to nitin.vaidya@georgetown.edu

Research Funding

Our research in recent years has been funded by several different research grants:

2017 Google Faculty Research Award
Army Research Laboratory, Alliance for IoBT Research on Evolving Intelligent Goal-driven Networks (IoBT REIGN), 2017-2022
National Science Foundation, AiTF: Collaborative Research: Algorithms for Smartphone Peer-to-Peer Networks, 2017-2020
National Science Foundation, Networked Multi-Agent Systems: Coping with Adversarial Agents and Links, 2016-2019
National Science Foundation, CyPhyHouse: A Laboratory for Evolving Distributed and Mobile Cyber-Physical Systems Research, 2016-2019
National Science Foundation, NeTS: Small: Impact of Wireless Network Characteristics on Distributed Computation, 2014-2018
National Science Foundation, CSR: Medium: Availability-Consistency Tradeoffs in Key-Value and NoSQL Storage Systems, 2014-2018
National Science Foundation, Distributed Asynchronous Algorithms and Software Systems for Wide-Area Monitoring of Power Systems, 2013-2018

Publications

Awards for Papers

Research by our group has been recognized by many paper awards

Talks

Videos and slides for several of my talks are available.

Website at UIUC

My previous website at UIUC provides additional information.

Mailing address:

Nitin Vaidya
358 St. Mary's Hall
Georgetown University
37th and O Streets NW
Washington D.C. 20057-1232