Robbert van Renesse

Robbert van Renesse
Senior Research Associate
rvr@cs.cornell.edu
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/rvr/
Ph.D. Vrije University, Amsterdam. 1989

I am a co-director of the Horus project. Horus is a general-purpose group communication framework for supporting distributed applications. It support micro-protocols that are stacked on top of each other to provide low-cost, arbitrary communication semantics to applications. The project is interested in fault-tolerance, correctness, security, scalability, and performance issues. Horus is co-directed by Ken Birman, and co-developed by Werner Vogels, Roy Friedman, and about five students.

I am also involved in a second project, with frequent visitor Dag Johansen (Tromsų University, Norway) and Fred Schneider. This project investigates the "agent'' paradigm, which is a mobile computation. Agents have almost human characteristics, as they travel through the network, interact with each other, and pay for services using digital cash. We have implemented a prototype agent system and are interested particularly in fault-tolerance issues (the "agent integrity problem'').

Professional Activities

Program committee: TINA '96 (Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture)

Lectures

Agent-based computing. 5th International Working Conference on Dependable Computing for Critical Applications, UIUC, September 28, 1995.

Publications

Software for reliable networks. In Scientific American 274, 5 (May 1996), 48-53 (with K.P. Birman).
Horus: A flexible group communication system. Communications of the ACM 39,4 (April 1996), 76-83 (with K.P. Birman and S. Maffeis).
A framework for protocol composition. Proceedings 14th Principles of Distributed Computing Conference, Ottawa, Ontario, August 1995, 80-89 (with K. Birman, R. Friedman, M. Hayden and D. Karr).

Return to:

1995-1996 Annual Report Home Page
Departmental Home Page If you have questions or comments please contact: www@cs.cornell.edu. Last modified: 2 November 1996 by Denise Moore (denise@cs.cornell.edu).