Peter Robinson
I'm an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Augusta University. My research focuses on designing new distributed algorithms and achieving fault-tolerance in communication networks against adversarial attacks.
My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (USA), the General Research Fund (Hong Kong), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada), IBM Research (UK), and the London Mathematical Society (UK).
News
New paper Deterministic Lower Bounds for k -Edge Connectivity in the Distributed Sketching Model at ACM PODS 2026!
New paper Message Optimality and Message-Time Trade-offs for APSP and Beyond at ACM PODC 2025!
- Slides for my talk at the workshop Algorithms for Massive Graphs @ DISC 2023
Research Papers
Code
Apart from theoretical research, I'm also interested in parallel and distributed programming and related technologies such as software transactional memory and the actor-model. I have been working on implementing a simulation environment for distributed algorithms in Elixir/Erlang, and implementing non-blocking data structures in Haskell suitable for multi-core machines. Below is a (non-comprehensive) list of software that I have written.
- concurrent hash table: a thread-safe hash table that scales to multicores.
- data dispersal: an implementation of an (m,n)-threshold information dispersal scheme that is space-optimal.
- secret sharing: an implementation of a secret sharing scheme that provides information-theoretic security.
- tskiplist: a data structure with range-query support for software transactional memory.
- stm-io-hooks: An extension of Haskell's Software Transactional Memory (STM) monad with commit and retry IO hooks.
- Mathgenealogy: Visualize your (academic) genealogy! A program for extracting data from the Mathematics Genealogy project.
- I extended Haskell's Cabal, for using a "world" file to keep track of installed packages. (Now part of the main distribution.)
Teaching
- Mathematical Structures for CS, Fall 2022, Spring 2023.
- Computer Networks, Fall 2021, Fall 2020, 2019.
- Database Systems, Spring 2021, Spring 2020.
- Distributed Computing, Spring 2019.
- Randomized Algorithms, Fall 2018: Intro slides. Part 1 on Concentration Bounds.
- Advanced Distributed Systems, Fall 2016, 2017.
- Computation with Data, Fall 2016.
- Internet and Web Technologies, Spring 2016.