Abstract
Multi-user applications are commonly implemented using a centralized server. In this talk I
will describe a new design for multi-user chat applications, Chronos, that works in a
distributed, serverless fashion over Named Data Networking. In Chronos, all participants
share their views by exchanging the cryptographic digests of the chat room data set. A newly
generated message causes a change of the digest at the message originator, informing other
participants to retrieving the new data. This completely distributed design eliminates the
single point of failure and traffic concentration problems in server-based implementations.
We believe that the basic approach of replacing centralized servers by distributed data
synchronization can be applied to a variety of distributed applications.

Biography
Lixia Zhang received her Ph.D in computer science from MIT and joined Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center as a member of research staff. She is now a professor in the Computer
Science Department of UCLA. In the past she served as the vice chair of ACM SIGCOMM,
member of the editorial board for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, member of the
Internet Architecture Board, and co-chair of the Routing Research Group under IRTF. She is
a fellow of ACM and IEEE. She received IEEE Internet Award in 2009 and holds UCLA
Postel Chair in Computer Science.