Mahyar Malekpour

I am a research engineer at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton VA. I have an M.S. in electrical engineering and have been out of school for quite a while. Although I’m no longer used to sitting in a classroom, I’ll always be a student in search of knowledge wherever I can find it. I see CSSS09 as a great opportunity to meet young scientists working in various fields and I look forward to learn from all of you.

My research interests include distributed systems, fault tolerance, distributed clock synchronization, algorithm development, and model checking. I’m currently working on autonomous synchronization of distributed systems in adverse environments and in the presence of malicious elements. I use model checking, a Formal Methods technique, to verify algorithm properties. Although this work is highly theoretical, it has many practical applications, especially, in the area of safety critical systems.

For more information visit my home page (http://shemesh.larc.nasa.gov/people/mahyar/). You’ll find my email address there. However, I have to add that I won’t be bringing my laptop. So, any email you send me will have to wait till after I get back from CSSS09. While in Santa Fe, I’d prefer to talk face to face. I look forward to many stimulating conversations.

Here are some of my questions: Have you ever seen tropical fireflies (aka lightning bugs) blink in a large group? They flash in synchrony. How do they and other organisms synchronize their behavior?

Living organisms exhibit various solutions for tolerating faults/deficiencies, but I wonder if other species, beside us, exhibit malicious behavior towards each other or other species? Is there a manifestation of a Byzantine behavior in other species?

Although hiking those hills should be awesome, I wonder if we’ll get a chance to participate in team sports like volleyball or football (aka soccer).