Research

Distributed systems are increasingly shifting from centralized to decentralized architectures. Decentralized systems replicate data to improve the system’s scalability and availability. However, the CAP theorem makes it impossible for partition-tolerant systems to be both strongly consistent and continuously available. Hence, modern applications tend to relax the consistency guarantees when possible and adhere to weaker consistency models which guarantee better availability and performance.

Building highly available systems currently remains cumbersome because replicas can be modified concurrently. Hence, programmers need to manually deal with inconsistent states. Solving such inconsistencies requires advanced knowledge of conflict resolution techniques which can only be expected from experts in distributed systems.

The goal of my research is to design and implement a general-purpose framework for highly available distributed systems. My framework will provide programmers with the means to trade off the availability and consistency of individual objects without requiring all objects to adhere to the same consistency model. My framework will also empower developers to control the dissemination of replicated data. To achieve this goal three concrete objectives will be completed:

  • A mixed-consistency distributed programming model
  • A general-purpose strong eventually consistent replicated data type
  • A scoping mechanism for data replication

  • 2018 - Present

    PhD in Computer Science

    Vrije Universiteit Brussel

  • 2016 - 2018

    MSc in Applied Sciences and Engineering: Computer Science

    Vrije Universiteit Brussel

    Software Languages and Software Engineering
    Honors: summa cum laude

  • 2016 - 2017

    Honours Programme: Science Beyond Boundaries

    Vrije Universiteit Brussel

    Theme: Artificial Intelligence, Cognition and Creativity

  • 2013 - 2016

    BSc in Computer Science

    Vrije Universiteit Brussel

    Honors: magna cum laude

  • March 2017 to present

    Colorlib

    Senior Web Developer
    Santa monica, Los angeles

  • March 2017 to present

    Colorlib

    Senior Web Developer
    Santa monica, Los angeles

  • March 2017 to present

    Colorlib

    Senior Web Developer
    Santa monica, Los angeles

Publications & Awards

Awards

  • BrEA: "Prijs voor de Computerwetenschappen"
    Thesis title: A Distributed Programming Language for Available and Consistent Sharing of Objects
    Thesis promotor: Prof. dr. Elisa Gonzalez Boix
    Thesis advisors: Florian Myter, Christophe De Troyer

Publications

Journals

  • AmbientJS: A Mobile Cross-Platform Actor Library for Multi-Networked Mobile Applications
    Elisa Gonzalez Boix, Kevin De Porre, Wolfgang De Meuter and Christophe Scholliers.
    In Programming with Actors. [Preprint] [Springer]
  • CScript: A Distributed Programming Language for Building Mixed-Consistency Applications
    Kevin De Porre, Florian Myter, Christophe Scholliers, and Elisa Gonzalez Boix.
    Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, vol. 144, pp. 109-123 (2020). [Preprint] [ScienceDirect]

Conferences

  • Putting Order in Strong Eventual Consistency
    De Porre K., Myter F., De Troyer C., Scholliers C., De Meuter W., Gonzalez Boix E. (2019)
    In: Pereira J., Ricci L. (eds) Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems. DAIS 2019.
    Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11534. Springer, Cham. [Preprint] [Springer]
  • ECROs: Building Global Scale Systems from Sequential Code
    Kevin De Porre, Carla Ferreira, Nuno Preguiça, and Elisa Gonzalez Boix.
    Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, vol 5, OOPSLA, Article 107 (October 2021). [Preprint] [ACM]

Workshops

  • A Generic Replicated Data Type for Strong Eventual Consistency (Extended Abstract)
    Kevin De Porre, Florian Myter, Christophe De Troyer, Christophe Scholliers, Wolfgang De Meuter and Elisa Gonzalez Boix.
    Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC '19). [Preprint] [ACM]
  • Squirrel: An Extensible Distributed Key-Value Store
    Kevin De Porre and Elisa Gonzalez Boix.
    Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Meta-Programming Techniques and Reflection (META '19). [Preprint] [ACM]