Yvonne-Anne Pignolet

DFINITY, Switzerland


Keynote Title:
Seven years, seven challenges: The Chronicles of Building a Decentralized Cloud

Time & Venue

Abstract

In 2019, the vision of a "World Computer", a decentralized, global platform for hosting software and data, was largely theoretical. Seven years later, it's a running system. This talk tells the story of building the Internet Computer (IC), a public blockchain network operating as a stateful serverless cloud. The IC acts as a stateful serverless cloud, running over 900K applications for millions of users in a sharded, Byzantine-fault-tolerant setup. We'll explore the journey of moving from a simple ledger to a full-stack platform that serves web content, hosts complex services, and manages terabytes of state. I will debunk common blockchain-related myths and present how we developed novel approaches to overcome the challenges we faced in designing, implementing, and deploying the Internet Computer. I'll cover the problems that are often glossed over, from the tyranny of determinism to the reality of geo-distributed state management. This talk is for an audience who wants to know what really happens when you try to replace the entire cloud stack with a decentralized protocol.

Biography

Yvonne-Anne Pignolet’s research is centered around distributed systems, ranging from the design and analysis of algorithms for reliable and efficient distributed systems despite failures and malicious behavior to complex network analysis. She obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from ETH Zurich, Switzerland in 2009. After 10 years of working in industrial research labs at IBM and ABB, Yvonne-Anne joined DFINITY in 2019, where she leads teams of researchers and engineers building and improving the Internet Computer.