Computer Science Colloquium

We first review popular P2P file-sharing systems, including Napster, Gnutella and Morpheus. We observe that one major shortcoming of these P2P systems is that there is no collaboration among peers - each peer acts in its own interest, thereby wasting bandwidth and storage. In this talk we propose and analyze new P2P algorithms for which collaboration plays a central role. Our algorithms are simple, distributed, do not rely on a content index, and increase significantly P2P performance.

Keith Ross has been a professor at the Eurecom Institute (Sophia Antipolis, France) since 1997. Before joining Eurecom, he was a professor in the Department of Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania from 1985 through 1997. Professor Ross's principle research interests are in the theory and practice computer networking. He has published over 60 papers and has supervised 13 Ph.D. students. He was written two books, including a best-selling textbook, "Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet," (with Jim Kurose), which was published by Addison Wesley in 2000. He is also the principle founder of Wimba, an Internet startup specializing in asynchronous voice and eLearning.