Talk by Dr. Marc Shapiro

Abstract:

A Commutative Replicated Data Type (CRDT) is one where all concurrent operations commute.
The replicas of a CRDT converge automatically, without complex concurrency control. I will describe Treedoc, a novel CRDT design for cooperative text editing.An essential property is that the identifiers of Treedoc atoms are selected from a dense space.
I discuss practical alternatives for implementing the identifier space based on an extended binary tree. I also discuss storage alternatives for data and meta-data, and mechanisms for compacting the tree. In the best case, Treedoc incurs no overhead with respect to a linear text buffer.
 
Short biography:

Dr. Shapiro graduated from ENSEEIHT , in Toulouse (France), in 1978, and received his Ph.D. from the Université Paul-Sabatier of Toulouse in 1980. After a post-doc at MIT, 1980--1982, he worked for the Centre Mondial Informatique et Ressources Humaines in Paris from 1982 to 1984. His collaboration with INRIA started in 1983; in 1985 he started the SOR group. He spent the 1993--1994 year on sabbatical at the Computer Science Department of Cornell University in Ithaca, NY (USA). He was the coordinator for the Esprit Long Term Research project PerDiS, a Persistent Distributed Store for Cooperative Engineering applications. He led the Cambridge Distributed Systems Group at MSRC, Microsoft Research Ltd. in Cambridge (UK) from October 1998 to March 2005. He is currently at INRIA Rocquencourt, in the Regal group, located at Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6).
 
Dr. Shapiro is the founder and current chair of the EuroSys, the European professional society in systems and European Chapter of SIGOPS. He was Vice-Chair of ACM SIGOPS , the Special Interest Group on Operating Systems, from 1995 to 1999. He founded its French chapter, ASF, which he chaired from 1996 to 2000. He chairs EuroSys, its European chapter, which he helped found in 2005.
 
He has been a member of several Program Commitees in operating systems, distributed systems, persistent systems, and garbage collection. Currently he is a PC member of ICDCS 2007, Opodis 2007, Data Management in Grids 2007, ECSS 2008 and PPoPP 2008.