I'll present COS205, a course that I taught at Princeton during the Spring 2023 semester. The course synthesizes many abstractions, algorithms, and data structures learned in core CS courses, and makes them concrete by building a complete computer system from the ground up.
Blockchains have ignited interest in Internet-scale consensus as a fundamental building block for decentralized applications and services, which in turn promise more egalitarian access and improved robustness to faults and abuse.
The past decade saw renewed interest in decentralized systems, fueled by their promises to harden vital services in our society against intentional and unintentional corruption, and to equalize access to these services.
Traditionally one assumes a regulator (or potential future consumers) would punish a platform for deviating from its promised specification. However, this is not always possible, even with publicly available data.
As quantum computing transforms from lab curiosity to technical reality, we must unlock its full potential to enable meaningful benefits on real-world applications with imperfect quantum technology.
Large-scale quantum computers will require error correction in order to reliably perform computations. However, the hardware overhead for error correction remains dauntingly large, with each logical qubit potentially requiring thousands of physical qubits for reliable operation.
This talk is motivated by the question: why do we put so much effort and investment into quantum computing? A short answer is that we expect the existence of quantum computational advantage, especially for practical problems.
Quantum computers introduce a radically new paradigm of information processing and revolutionize our thinking about the world. However, designing and building quantum computers that operate properly even when some of their components malfunction and cause errors is a heroic endeavor.
Quantum computation has potential to solve problems that are out of reach for today’s classical computers. Many of the proposed applications for quantum computers (QCs), such as those in chemistry, material science, and optimization, are capable of substantial human impact.
This talk provides an overview of potential motivations for decentralizing online platforms and explores how the governance of these platforms might work.