CANCELED: February 26, 2015: Invited Speaker Seminar: Multiplayer Games and their Need for Scalable and Secure State Management

Dr. Bettina Kemme
Associate Professor, School of Computer Science
McGill University

Thursday, February 26 at 4:00 p.m.
Room EV003.309

Abstract

Multiplayer Games are an extremely popular online technology, one that produces billions of dollars in revenues. The underlying architecture of game engines is distributed by nature and has to maintain large amounts of quickly changing state. In particular, each client has its own partial view of a continuously evolving virtual world, and all these client copies have to be kept up-to-date. Not only do games require low response times and scalability, the game engine must also be able to prevent and/or avoid malicious cheating behaviour. In this talk, I will present an overview of current game architectures, and outline possible solutions to scalable, fast, and secure game state maintenance.

Biography

Bettina Kemme is an Associate Professor at the School of Computer Science of McGill University, Montreal, where she leads the distributed information systems lab. She holds a PhD degree in Computer Science from ETH Zurich, and an undergraduate degree from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universitaet Erlangen, Germany. Bettina has published over 70 publications in major journals and conferences in the areas of database systems and distributed systems as well as served on the program committee and as area chair of the major database and distributed systems conferences such as SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, ICDCS, Middleware and many more. Her research focuses on large-scale distributed data management with a main focus on data consistency and data dissemination.