Carlos Baquero

Short Bio

I am a Professor in the Department of Informatics Engineering within FEUP, and area coordinator at the High Assurance Laboratory (HASLab) within INESC TEC. From 1994 till mid 2021 I was affiliated with the Informatics Department, Universidade do Minho, where I concluded my PhD (2000) and Habilitation/Agregação (2018).

My research interests cover data management in eventual consistent settings, distributed data aggregation and causality tracking. In the last years I have collaborated with my co-authors in the development of data summary mechanisms such as Scalable Bloom Filters, causality tracking for dynamic settings with Interval Tree Clocks and Dotted Version Vectors and in predictable eventual consistency with Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types. My work has been applied in the Riak distributed database, Redis CRDBs, Akka distributed data, Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, and is running in production systems serving millions of users worldwide.

Contact: cbm (at) fe.up.pt

Projects

Ongoing:

• CoronaSurveys - Measuring the magnitude and evolution of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Past:

• LightKone - Lightweight computation for networks at the edge
• SyncFree - Closing the gap between consistency and availability

Publications

Some selected publications:

• Using survey data to estimate the impact of the omicron variant on vaccine efficacy against COVID-19 infection. Jesús Rufino et al. (Nature) Scientific Reports. Jan 2023.
• The Dynamics of Remembering and Forgetting. Carlos Baquero, Rosa Cabecinhas. Communications of the ACM. July 2022.
• Picking publication targets. Carlos Baquero. Communications of the ACM. March 2022.
• Efficient Replication via Timestamp Stability. Vitor Enes, Carlos Baquero, Alexey Gotsman, Pierre Sutra. EuroSys, 2021.
• Efficient Synchronization of State-based CRDTs. Vitor Enes, Paulo Sérgio Almeida, Carlos Baquero, João Leitão. Proceedings of the 35th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2019.
• Delta state replicated data types. Paulo Sérgio Almeida, Ali Shoker, Carlos Baquero. Elsevier. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. Volume 111. January 2018.
• Why Logical Clocks are Easy. Carlos Baquero and Nuno Preguiça. 2016. Communications of the ACM 59, 4 (March 2016), 43-47.
• A Survey of Distributed Data Aggregation Algorithms. Paulo Jesus, Carlos Baquero, Paulo Sérgio Almeida. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. 2015.
• Flow updating: Fault-tolerant aggregation for dynamic networks. Paulo Jesus, Carlos Baquero, Paulo Sérgio Almeida. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Volume 78, April 2015.
• Extrema propagation: Fast distributed estimation of sums and network sizes. Carlos Baquero, Paulo Sérgio Almeida, Raquel Menezes, Paulo Jesus. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. Volume 23, Issue 4. 2012.
• Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types. Marc Shapiro, Nuno M. Preguiça, Carlos Baquero, Marek Zawirski. Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems. LNCS, Springer Verlag, 2011.
• Scalable Bloom Filters. Paulo Sérgio Almeida, Carlos Baquero, Nuno Preguiça, David Hutchison. Information Processing Letters. Volume 101, Issue 6. Pages 255-261. 2007.

For a full list of papers check my Google Scholar.

Blog posts

• What is an Author?. January 2023, BLOG@CACM.
• The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems. December 2022, BLOG@CACM.
• On the Ethics of Writing With AIs. August 2022, BLOG@CACM.
• Biases in Author Recognition. April 2022, BLOG@CACM.
• Publishing, The Choice and The Luck. November 2021, BLOG@CACM.
• We Are Camille. September 2021, BLOG@CACM.
• Estimating active cases of COVID-19: The unknown matters. July 2020, INESC TEC.
• Aggregation is not Replication. November 2018, HASLab.
• Version Vectors are not Vector Clocks. July 2011, HASLab.

Press/Op-ed articles (in Portuguese)

• Acesso aberto, o “slow science” e o “fast science”. January 2023, Expresso.

Classes

2022/2023 @ FEUP

• Large Scale Distributed Systems (Sistemas Distribuídos de Larga Escala). Mestrado em Engenharia Informática e Computação.
• Distributed and Parallel Computing (Computação Paralela e Distribuída). Licenciatura em Engenharia Informática e Computação.
• Operating Systems (Sistemas Operativos). Licenciatura em Engenharia Informática e Computação.

2021/2022 @ FEUP

• Large Scale Distributed Systems (Sistemas Distribuídos de Larga Escala). Mestrado em Engenharia Informática e Computação.
• Operating Systems (Sistemas Operativos). Licenciatura em Engenharia Informática e Computação.

2020/2021 @ UMinho

• Large Scale Distributed Systems, taught at MIEI.
  • Slides: Intro,Graphs,P2P,Time,EC
• Distributed Systems, taught at MIEI and MIETI.

Service

• DisCoTec. IFIP, EAPLS - DisCoTec 2023 - 18th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques. Publicity Chair.

• PaPoC. Steering committee of the workshop series on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data, regularly hosted with EuroSys. Links to ACM DL: PaPoC’21,PaPoC’20,PaPoC’19.

• JSys. I am contributing to the launch of JSys (Journal of Systems Research) in the editorial board, a diamond open-access journal covering all areas of computer systems research.

PC Member:

PaPoC’20, SRDS’19, SRDS’18, PaPoC’17, DAIS’17, W-PSDS’16, PaPoC’16, DAIS’16, DCOSS’16, W-PSDS’15, DAIS’15, Middleware’15, PaPoC’15 (Co-Chair), DAIS’14, Middleware’14, EuroPar’13.

Talks

Industry:

• J on the Beach, Málaga, May 2023.
• J on the Beach, Málaga, Apr 2022. [Video]
• Redis Day London, Nov 2018. [Slides] [Video]
• Code Mesh LDN, Nov 2018. [Video]
• Redis Conference, Apr 2018.
• Papers-we-Love Madrid, Sep 2016.
• Berlin Buzzwords, 2016. [Video]
• Basho Ricon, Oct 2014.

Meetings:

• Dagstuhl 19442, Oct 2019. Programming Languages for Distributed Systems and Distributed Data Management.
• Shonan 149, May 2019. Programming Languages for Distributed Systems.
• Dagstuhl 18091, Fev 2018. Data Consistency in Distributed Systems: Algorithms, Programs, and Databases.
• Dagstuhl 13081, Fev 2013. Consistency In Distributed Systems.

Advising

Current:

• Distributed Statistical Learning. Daniel Tinoco. Math PhD
• TDB. Pedro Henrique Fernandes. PRODEI PhD
• Scalable Solutions for Eventual Consistency. Juliane Marubayashi. MEI MSc
• A Library of Transactional CRDTs. Luís Recharte. MEI MSc

Alumni:

• Dynamic End-to-End Reliable Causal Delivery Middleware for Geo-Replicated Services. Georges Younes. PhD, 2023
• Planet-Scale Leaderless Consensus. Vitor Enes. PhD, 2022
• Broadcast Cancellation in Unstructured Networks. Rui Lima. PhD, 2018
• Robust Distributed Data Aggregation. Paulo Jesus. PhD, 2012
• Causality Tracking in Dynamic Distributed Systems. Victor Fonte . PhD, 2009
• Information Search in Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Systems. Nuno Lopes. PhD, 2009

Links

DBLP, Google Scholar, ACM DL, ORCID, Publons, Scopus

Mastodon

Miscellaneous

• 90 Seconds of Radio fame :) 90 Segundos de Ciência
• Dind’t publish on Nature (yet), but my tweets have found their way there Old papers find new life online
• My Erdős number is 3, some paths are:
  • Karl Henrik Johansson - Béla Bollobás - Paul Erdős
  • Antonio Fernández Anta - Shmuel Zaks - Paul Erdős
  • Martín Farach-Colton - Noga Alon - Paul Erdős
• My wife Raquel Menezes is Associate Professor in Statistics at the Mathematics Department in Minho University.