INESC TEC researcher publishes first paper in Communications of the ACM

Carlos Baquero, researcher at INESC TEC’s High-Assurance Software Laboratory (HASLab) and professor at the University of Minho, is the first INESC TEC researcher to publish an article in the journal Communications of the ACM. The article, titled “Why logical clocks are easy” was published in the journal’s April issue.
In the paper, produced together with Nuno Preguiça, researcher at the Nova Laboratory for Computer Science and Informatics, the HASLab researcher addresses the theme of causality in distributed systems, considered an essential component for understanding the physical world and the interactions between humans.

According to the work carried out by the researchers, in a computer system there are several sequences of actions performed in various locations. Moreover, the cause-effect relations in these actions are fundamental for developing the algorithms. Traditionally a complex issue for programmers, this work puts the focus on the nature of causality, and the concept of causal stories, and shows how version vectors, vector clocks and other more sophisticated mechanisms can handle millions of customers, allowing them to interact simultaneously with online stores.

This paper is the result of a thorough research in the field of causality, and these results have already been adopted by several international companies, such as SoundCloud (music platform), Basho (Big Data platform), or Bet 365 (online betting).

The Communications of the ACM is a monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and features content relating to the areas of Information Technology, Computing and Information Technology. It is considered the market leader and recognised as the most reliable and knowledgeable source on issues related to these areas of expertise.

The INESC TEC researcher mentioned in this news piece is associated with U.Minho.