The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

The talk includes two parts. First, we consider the problem of designing repair-efficient distributed storage systems that are secure against a passive eavesdropper that can observe the contents of any subset of nodes of limited size. We present a universal framework for the design of coset-coding based outer codes that enables information-theoretic security properties for a broad class of storage codes. As case studies, we consider minimum storage regenerating codes with small repair degree, maximally recoverable codes, and locally repairable codes.

In the second part of the talk, we consider the problem of Private Information Retrieval (PIR) in the presence of an adversary with prior side information. This problem is motivated by practical settings in which the user can obtain side information opportunistically from other users or has previously downloaded some messages using classical PIR schemes. Our objective is to enable the user to retrieve the required message without revealing its identity while minimizing the amount of data downloaded from the servers. We establish lower bounds on the minimum rate of a data retrieval scheme for the single server scenario and present an optimal retrieval schemes that satisfy different privacy constraints.

Joint work with Swanand Kadhe, Brenden Garcia, Anoosheh Heidarzadeh, and Salim El Rouayheb

Bio:
Dr. Sprintson is a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station. He received his B.S. degree (summa cum laude), M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Technion in 1995, 2001, and 2003, respectively. From 2003 to 2005, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. His research interests lie in the general area of communication networks with a focus on wireless network coding, distributed storage, and software defined networks. Dr. Sprintson received the Wolf Award for Distinguished Ph.D.students, the Viterbi Postdoctoral Fellowship, the TAMU College of Engineering Outstanding Contribution Award and the NSF CAREER award. He serves as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. He has been a member of the Technical Program Committee for the IEEE Infocom 2006--2017.