Tweeting live from João Barreto's PhD defense

Tweeting live from João Barreto's PhD defense. Good luck João!

The committee members are putting on their robes. José Carlos Monteiro is wearing the MIT robes, hat included.

José Alves Marques is presiding. The defense has started. First the 30 minute presentation.

João is explaining the problem. The presentation graphics look nice.

Thesis goals were rapid commitment, and minimal aborted work.

contributions a) commitment protocol, b) exploitation of non-replicas for improved consistency, c) redundancy elimination in storage and propagation of state-based updates.

João is explaining the commitment protocol based on epidemic voting (VVWV).

Moving on to b) exploitation of non-replicas. It's an interesting idea. They carry only the voting information.

Getting to c) redundancy elimination. João is placing his related publications in each slide's footer.

João has been presenting his results using graphs. It's always good to see hard data.

1 minute conclusions slide. Maybe too fast? Now all 9 publications are on display in the final slide.

Marc Shapiro is now asking questions to João.

Discussing whether application semantics should or shouldn't be used.

Carlos Moreno (DI/Univ. Minho) made some good overall comments about the thesis. Now going chapter by chapter.

Carlos Moreno is asking some questions to João. Some of the issues were out of the thesis' scope

Q&A with Carlos Moreno continues... Now discussing the possibility of applying the results to sensor networks.

Carlos Moreno asking a question about the sampling (Are 5 runs enough to average?). Now moving to final question.

José Carlos Monteiro (JCM) is now addressing João. Particularly liked Chapter 2. It explains all the required concepts.

JCM found a gap: algorithms are for limited devices but there are no figures for resource consumption of algorithms.

José Alves Marques (JAM) is talking now. Lot of effort in the thesis. Chapter 2 is very good although a glossary missing.

JAM is asking what is the rationale of the thesis - or is the thesis just a sum of 3 parts?

Paulo Ferreira is the final speaker. It's an important day for João - he's wearing a tie!

João started his work in early 2000s. Research started with MS ad-hocFS. He has a good publication record.

Paulo Ferreira is giving some nice questions to João. It's a good thing to have a friendly adviser.

The defense is over. We're now waiting for the announcement of the new Doctor...

Congratulations Doctor João Barreto! It was a pleasure being here. Now, back to Distributed Systems course work and my own PhD.