Amr El Abbadi

Department of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara

Abstract

Bitcoin is a successful and interesting example of a global scale peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that integrates many techniques and protocols from cryptography, distributed systems, and databases. The main underlying data structure is blockchain, a scalable fully replicated structure that is shared among all participants and guarantees a consistent view of all user transactions by all participants in the system. In cryptocurrencies, the blockchain is often referred to as permissionless, since it operates in a setting where the identity, let alone the number, of participants is unknown. Furthermore, the participants are not trusted. Permissioned blockchains, on the other hand, assume the number of participants is known in advance, albeit possible that they are not trusted. The main application for permissioned blockchains are supply chain databases as well as many other database applications that require the notion of provenance. In this talk I will argue that both permissionless as well as permissioned blockchains present interesting opportunities for the database community. There are many opportunities for exploiting sharding database technologies that support large scale data management to improve the throughput of transactions in permissioned blockchains. In permissionless blockchains, on the other hand, I will discuss how atomic commitment provides an excellent framework to support the fault-tolerant atomic exchange of assets among different blockchains. This is particularly important given the proliferation of different crypto currencies where users need to atomically exchange assets without depending on centralized intermediaries such as exchanges.

Biography

Amr El Abbadi is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his B. Eng. from Alexandria University, Egypt, and his Ph.D. from Cornell University. Prof. El Abbadi is an ACM Fellow, AAAS Fellow, and IEEE Fellow. He was Chair of the Computer Science Department at UCSB from 2007 to 2011. He has served as a journal editor for several database journals, including, The VLDB Journal, IEEE Transactions on Computers and The Computer Journal. He has been Program Chair for multiple database and distributed systems conferences. He currently serves on the executive committee of the IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering (TCDE) and was a board member of the VLDB Endowment from 2002 to 2008. In 2007, Prof. El Abbadi received the UCSB Senate Outstanding Mentorship Award for his excellence in mentoring graduate students. In 2013, his student, Sudipto Das received the SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award. Prof. El Abbadi is also a co-recipient of the Test of Time Award at EDBT/ICDT 2015. He has published over 300 articles in databases and distributed systems and has supervised over 35 PhD students.