Claudia Ignat (Coast team) will defend her HDR (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches), entitled “Large-scale trustworthy distributed collaborative systems” on Friday April 23 at 3pm. The defense will be held in English.

Short abstract:

Most existing collaborative systems rely on a central authority and place personal information in the hands of a single large corporation which is a perceived privacy threat. Moreover, these systems do not scale well in terms of the number of users and their modifications. My research work aims to move away from centralized authority-based collaboration towards a large scale trust-based peer-to-peer collaboration where control over data is given to users who can decide with whom to share their data. The main advantages of peer-to-peer collaborative systems are high scalability and resilience to faults and attacks.

First, I describe my contributions to the design and evaluation of optimistic data replication algorithms. I also present my work on group awareness specifically on what information should be provided to users to prevent conflicting changes and to understand divergence when conflicts cannot be avoided.

Secondly, I describe my contributions on large scale trustworthy collaboration. I present a contract-based collaboration model where contracts are specified by the data owners when they share the data and user trust is assessed according to the observation of adherence to or violation of contracts. For testing the proposed trust-based collaboration model, I designed a user experiment employing trust game and relying on a computational trust metric according to user exchanges in this game.

Finally, I present my future research directions on secure and trustworthy collaborative data management.

Keywords: distributed collaborative systems, operational transformation, CRDT, group awareness, trust, contract-based collaboration, authenticated logs, trust game, user studies

More details are available here

Jury members
Reviewers
Prasun DEWAN, Professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Valerie ISSARNY, Director of research at Inria
François TAIANI, Professor at Université de Rennes I

Examiners
Sihem AMER-YAHIA, Director of research at CNRS
François CHAROY, Professor at Université de Lorraine
Isabelle CHRISMENT, Professor at Université de Lorraine
Fabien GANDON, Director of research at Inria
Pascal MOLLI, Professor at Université de Nantes