Speakers: Georg Jäger (LASIGE) & Robin Vassantlal (LASIGE, DI/FCUL)
Date: April 19, 2023, 12h00
Where: C6.3.27
Talk 1: Safety Guarantees in Presence of Disturbances and Uncertainties – Regions of Safety and Beyond?
Abstract: Providing safety for any system implies that the involved risk of operation is reduced to an acceptable level at design time. This involves showing that safety-relevant failures on a component level are compensated for such that the overall system is robust/resilient to them. For that, models of the system, the involved components, and the environment need to be developed – and their uncertainties have to be taken into consideration.
In this talk, we will first learn about the approach of Regions of Safety for analyzing a control system’s ability to maintain a safe state as a specific approach to provide safety guarantees in presence of disturbances and uncertainties. Building up on that, we will discuss related challenges when dealing with disturbances and uncertainties using more complex use cases from the field of robotics.
Short Bio: Georg Jäger is a postdoctoral researcher at LASIGE as well as at the TU Bergakademie Freiberg (Germany), where he received his Ph.D. in 2022. His research is focused on safety and safety guarantees in autonomous, cyber-physical systems.
Talk 2: Making the Consensus with Unknown Participants Model Practical for Blockchains
Abstract: Consensus plays a crucial role in blockchain to decide the order of blocks. There are several solutions to solve the consensus. However, solutions for the open setting where the number of participants is unknown have several limitations. These limitations include high energy consumption, low performance, and not guaranteeing consensus finality property.
In this talk, we will discuss ongoing work on making practical a mostly uncharted Consensus with Unknown Participants (CUP) distributed system model for blockchain. In more detail, we will present the CUP model and the limitations of CUP that have to be tackled to adapt it for the blockchain open setting and current challenges/attempts to address those limitations.
Short Bio: Robin Vassantlal is a PhD student doing research on designing secure and scalable open blockchains. He obtained his MSc degree in Informatics Engineering in 2019, where he developed a confidentiality framework for the replicated systems to protect private data from the adversary. His main research interests include confidentiality, consensus, and blockchains.