In today's knowledge driven societies, data has emerged as an important asset. Protecting this asset is thus exigent. There are a multitude of threats, and the term protection can thus be interpreted in various manner, depending on the context. Because of numerous data breach incidents that are reported in the news on an almost daily basis, data confidentiality comes foremost to one's mind when data protection is discussed. But in addition to confidentiality, it is crucial that data does not get destroyed due to corruption of the data (integrity), and it remains available at any time and manner in which the data owner may wish to access or share the data with others. The confidentiality, integrity, availability proeprties together are known as the CIA-triad of security objectives. There are in fact further desirable security objectives, such as authenticity, utility, and so on.

The proposed course focuses on distributed storage systems - and specifically how redundancy is managed in such systems to achieve fault tolerance and availability (and at the same time, deal with issues such as consistency). Specifically, this course delves into the technological aspects of modern distributed storage systems of varied granularity, from single appliance RAID systems, to data centers that form the back-end of cloud computing, to multi-cloud and edge computing environments - encompassing varied degrees of logical, administrative and geographic distribution of data, and looks at techniques that help achieve data availability and integrity.

Specifically, this course will (i) introduce the mathematical foundations for coding theory, (ii) provide concrete example instances of algorithms, maximum distance separable erasure codes, network codes, local reconstruction codes, proof of data possession/retrievability, and (iii) showcase usage of these primitives in example systems - some proposed as part of academic research, others proposed and deployed by industry players such as Linux RAID, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.

• Introduction & mathematical foundations
• Introduction to basic concepts and an overview of the course
• Introductory number theory
• Coding theory
• Traditional erasure /error correcting codes
• Codes tailor made for distributed storage systems
• Codes for storage systems
• Cloud scale storage systems
• Real world distributed storage systems (including those based on replication)

• The course will be self-contained, starting from very basics, leading to advanced topics. Nevertheless, anyone comfortable with mathematical concepts, and algorithmic abstractions will best benefit from the course.
• Executives, engineers and researchers from service and government organizations including R&D laboratories.
• Student at all levels (BTech/MSc/MTech/PhD) or Faculty from reputed academic institutions and technical institutions.

Anwitaman's research interests span the topics of large-scale resilient distributed systems, information security and applications of data analytics. Some of his distinctive and pioneering research contributions in recent years include (i) the application of machine learning and stereotyping to computational trust, (ii) decentralized online social networks for privacy and censorship resistance, (iii) self-repairing (locally repairable) erasure codes for distributed storage systems. He has also made significant contributions to several other well established research topics, including cloud security, data center and NoSQL data stores, collaborative systems, social network analysis and decision support applications such as team recommendation, word sense disambiguation, entity and event identification. His research (130+ publications, 4000+ cites as per Google scholar) has been recognised internationally - both at academic platforms (best paper awards at ICDCS 2007, ICDCN 2011/2014) and by the industry (HP Labs Innovation Research Program (IRP) Award 2008). He has secured multiple competitive research grants and led several Singaporean as well as international collaborative (with Eurecom, TU Darmstadt, PJIIT Warsaw) research projects. He has also been regularly invited to deliver graduate level mini-courses and seminars at different universities, for example, at Tokyo Denki University, KTH Stockholm, Technion Israel, University of Warsaw, Poland, and conducted several tutorials on special topics at conferences such as SASO, ICDCN, etc. More details...

The rates for accommodation charges are:

• Institute Hostel accommodation (sharing basis): ₹ 250 (per night)
• Institute Guest House: ₹ 1,500 (onward) + tax per night (per unit) [Based on category]