Jean-Claude Laprie Award to Professor Patrick Eugster
Institutional Communication Service
14 May 2025
Prof. Patrick Eugster, Full Professor at the Faculty of Informatics of Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), was awarded the prestigious Jean-Claude Laprie Award for a paper he co-authored with Rachid Guerraoui, S. B. Handurukande, Petr Kouznetsov and Anne-Marie Kermarrec, titled "Lightweight Probabilistic Broadcast".
The paper, presented by Professor Patrick Eugster at the 2001 IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks and published in the conference proceedings, "presented the first decentralised, reliable information dissemination protocol." The study is based on the intuitive idea of gossip, or epidemic information dissemination, and compared to previous works on similar topics, it introduced some significant innovations. In particular, by leveraging mathematical epidemiology, the paper shows that if each node has a random subset of information about its peers, the view size has very little impact on the latency of message dissemination.
In the award citation, it is noted that "Empirical evaluations support the formal analysis. The paper has been cited more than 800 times, it has impacted the design of many systems (e.g. Scribe, Splistream, Bullet, Cyclon, Tman, Scamp, BAR Gossip, Hermes, Spidercast, Tera and many others), on systems spanning a large class of applications: vehicular control (including cars and drones), live streaming, data storage (in a practical a large-scale storage system used in CERN), gaming, smart grids, NATS, Manets, blockchain systems, editing systems, digital libraries, healthcare and software-defined networks. For these reasons, the award Committee decided to also select this paper as one of the 2025 JCL award winners."
In his honour, the Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing has been presented annually since 2012 by the IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance. This award recognises outstanding contributions that have significantly impacted the theory and practice of Dependable Computing.