Computing in Distributed Environments.

The major goal of this research is to study the impact that global properties of a distributed environment and their local knowledge at each entity of the system have on the design of efficient distributed algorithms. Some of my goals are: to identify useful structural properties for efficiently solving a given problem, to exploit local knowledge for reducing the communication cost of a problem, to improve existing protocols or devise new ones by using appropriate choices in the design of the communication ports. Of particular interest are distributed mobile environments , where mobile entities inhabit a static system (e.g., software agents in a network); in this setting I am particularly concerned with security issues when computing in unsafe conditions.
Some of my research projects in this area include: distributed mobile computing in unsafe environments, distributed computing with sense of direction, dynamic monopolies …

Time-varying Graphs.

Highly dynamic networks are networks where connectivity changes in time and the connection patterns display a possibly complex dynamics. Such networks play an increasingly important role in the provision of many services and applications, and they appear in different contexts and situations. Examples of highly dynamic networks are transportation, pedestrian, vehicular networks, satellites, military, robotic networks, wireless, ad-hoc networks, and social networks. In this area, I am interesting in several issues, ranging from modelling to algorithm design, from computability to complexity analysis (e.g., see some of our recent papers in this area).

Cellular Automata and Discrete Chaos.

I am also interested in the study of discrete dynamical systems. In this area, my main goal is the understanding of the notion of discrete chaos. In particular, I study the complex ``chaotic" behaviors of Cellular Automata (CA) following algebraic approaches and using dynamical tools and I am interested in some models (fuzzy CA, coupled map lattices) which exhibit complex behaviors (see some of our recent papers in this area).

Some Research Projects