I'm an Associate Professor in the AU School of Computer & Cyber Sciences. My research focuses on designing new distributed and parallel algorithms, the distributed processing of big data, achieving fault-tolerance in communication networks against adversarial attacks, and developing robust protocols that work in highly dynamic environments such as peer-to-peer networks and mobile ad-hoc networks.

My research has been supported by the General Research Fund (Hong Kong), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada), IBM Research, and the London Mathematical Society (UK).

News

Research

2011
  • Optimal Regional Consecutive Leader Election in Mobile Ad-Hoc NetworksPDFDOI
    Hyun Chul Chung, Peter Robinson, Jennifer L. Welch. 7th ACM SIGACT/SIGMOBILE International Workshop on Foundations of Mobile Computing (part of FCRC 2011).
    Abstract
    The regional consecutive leader election (RCLE) problem requires mobile nodes to elect a leader within bounded time upon entering a specific region. We prove that any algorithm requires $\Omega(Dn)$ rounds for leader election, where D is the diameter of the network and $n$ is the total number of nodes. We then present a fault-tolerant distributed algorithm that solves the RCLE problem and works even in settings where nodes do not have access to synchronized clocks. Since nodes set their leader variable within $O(Dn)$ rounds, our algorithm is asymptotically optimal with respect to time complexity. Due to its low message bit complexity, we believe that our algorithm is of practical interest for mobile wireless ad-hoc networks. Finally, we present a novel and intuitive constraint on mobility that guarantees a bounded communication diameter among nodes within the region of interest.
2010
  • Regional Consecutive Leader Election in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks
    Hyun Chul Chung, Peter Robinson, Jennifer L. Welch. 6th ACM SIGACT/SIGMOBILE Workshop on Foundations of Mobile Computing (DIALM-POMC 2010).

Code

I'm interested in parallel and distributed programming and related technologies such as software transactional memory and the actor-model. Recently, 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.

Misc