Baturalp Buyukates wins 2nd place in Asilomar Conference student paper contest

Congratulations to ECE/ISR Ph.D. student Baturalp Buyukates, who won the second place award in the best student paper contest at the 2020 Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers for his paper, “Timely Updates in Distributed Computation Systems with Stragglers.” Buyukates is advised by Professor Sennur Ulukus (ECE/ISR).

The contest consisted of 355 accepted papers, of which 10 were selected as finalists for the top three best paper awards.

The paper considers a status update system in which the update packets need to be processed to extract the embedded useful information. The source node sends the acquired information to a computation unit (CU) which consists of a master node and n worker nodes. The master node distributes the received computation task to the worker nodes. Upon computation, the master node aggregates the results and sends them back to the source node to keep it updated. The age performance of uncoded and coded (repetition coded, MDScoded, and multi-message MDS (MM-MDS) coded) schemes in the presence of stragglers is studied under i.i.d. exponential transmission delays and i.i.d. shifted exponential computation times. Buyukates shows that the asymptotically MM-MDS coded scheme outperforms the other schemes. The paper also characterizes the age-optimal codes.

Published November 23, 2020