This year, twelve young researchers at TUM received financial support from the European Research Council (ERC) in the form of Starting Grants worth up to 1.5 million euros. Among them is Prof. Pramod Bhatotia, Chair of Distributed and Operating Systems.
Advancements in computing hardware and AI combined with big data have led to various data-driven intelligent applications in health, mobility, and robotics among others. These applications use a large number of decentralized computers to process user data. While becoming an integral part of our daily lives, they must be reliable and secure in a policy-compliant manner. An example is GDPR, which mandates the EU data protection policy. However, ensuring reliable and secure execution is challenging since it requires programming a diversified set of computers hosted in multiple untrusted jurisdictions.
To tackle these challenges, Prof. Pramod Bhatotia will receive an ERC Starting Grant to develop DOS, a Decentralized Operating System. The DOS project seeks to bridge this gap by pursuing a radically new hardware/OS co-design, where reliability and security properties are enforced by the foundational layers of computing in a policy-compliant manner.