Research is the art of pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Sometimes you succeed. Sometimes you fail.
And sometimes you have to just keep trying. As Douglas Adams said, "The knack [to flying] lies in learning
how to throw yourself at the ground and miss
”
Dr Seth GILBERT
PhD, MSc (Massachusetts Institute of Technology);
BSc (Yale University)
Department of Computer Science
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- Algorithms for large-scale, highly dynamic, distributed systems such as wide-area networks, mobile ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks and peer-to-peer networks
- Fault-tolerant and scalable protocols for communication and coordination in unreliable and unpredictable environments
- Developed groundbreaking algorithms that address the longstanding challenge of scheduling tasks efficiently and effectively on multiple processors
- Devised a revolutionary solution for sharing a limited resource efficiently among multiple processors that is an exponential improvement over existing solutions, and which has inspired new developments in sub-logarithmic coordination protocols
- Pioneered novel algorithms leveraging parallel communication channels to achieve efficiency and robustness in collecting and distributing data in a sensor network
- Built on his highly cited work on the CAP (Consistency, Availability and Partition tolerance) Theorem to shed light on the cost of sharing information in an unreliable network
- Introduced several intriguing possibilities in the area of rescheduling – relating to the trade-off in online optimisation between committing resources long-term and modifying resource allocation at a cost – potentially impacting many practical applications, from big-data processing to real-world scheduling problems, such as the assignment of police cars to respond to emergency calls
- Keen sense in identifying fundamental problems that will impact not just existing systems but also the technology we will be using in the future
- Strong ability in combining inspiration from practical real-world problems with fundamental algorithmic theory to develop novel approaches that provide a new way of looking at important problems
- More than 2,000 citations received for over 70 papers, with a significant number in premier journals such as Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and at leading conferences like Foundations of Computer Science and the Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC)
- Workshop/Tutorial Chair, International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC) (2014)
- Publicity Chair, PODC (2012 – 2013)
- Programme Committee member for over two dozen prestigious international conferences, including top ones such as PODC, DISC, the Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures, and the International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems
- External reviewer for numerous leading international journals such as Journal of the ACM, Distributed Computing and Journal of Information and Computation
- Dean's Chair Assistant Professor, NUS School of Computing (2013 – 2016)
- Best Paper, International Conference On Distributed Computing and Networking (2011)
"To develop new algorithms that will solve real-world problems, and to develop new algorithmic theory that is beautiful and elegant."