Universal constructions are methods for simulating any sequentially specified object in an asynchronous shared memory system with sufficiently powerful base objects, such as compare&swap. This talk will survey some existing universal constructions and present a new, more efficient one. This work is joint with Phong Chuong and Vijaya Ramachandran and will be presented at ACM SPAA 2010.
Faith Ellen is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Her research is concerned with the complexity of problems in distributed computing, especially concurrent data structures.
She received her B.Math. in Pure Mathematics and Computer Science in 1977 and her M.Math in Computer Science in 1978 from the University of Waterloo. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1982. From 1983 to 1986, she was an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Washington. She joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto in 1986. Professor Ellen was the vice-chair of ACM SIGACT from 1997 to 2001 and the chair of the steering committee for ACM PODC from 2006 to 2009.
