报告人：Lili Su, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

时间： 2016年12月29日早上10点

地点： 工控新楼501室

报告摘要：

In this talk, I will focus on the security aspect of the multi-agent optimization problem in which each agent has a local cost function, and the goal is to optimize a global cost function that aggregates the local cost functions. Such optimization problems are of interest in many contexts, includingdistributed machine learning and distributed resource allocation.We primarily focus on the case when some unknown subset of agents may suffer Byzantine faults, but also briefly discuss results for crash failures of the agents. In addition, we assume that the argument of each local cost function is a (real-valued) scalar, and the network is fully-connected.

For the Byzantine fault-tolerant optimization problem, the ideal goal is to optimize the average of local cost functions of the non-faulty agents. In general, when some of the agents may be Byzantine faulty, the above goal is provably impossible to achieve. Therefore, we consider a relaxed version of the problem.The goal for the relaxed problem is to generate an output that is an optimum of a global cost function formed as a convex combination of local cost functions of the non-faulty agents. We present a distributed algorithm that achieves optimal fault-tolerance.

报告人简介：

Lili Su is a Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working with Prof. Nitin Vaidya on distributed computing. She expects to receive her Ph.D. degree in May 2017. Her research interests include distributed computing, security, optimization, and learning. She was one of the three nominees for the 2016 International Symposium on DIStributed Computing Best Student Paper Award. She received the 2015 International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems Best Student Paper Award. She also received the SundaramSeshu International Student Fellowship for the academic year of 2016 to 2017 conferred by UIUC. In addition, she received the Outstanding Reviewer Award for her review service for IEEE Transactions on Communication in 2015.