Update publications.bib

publications.bib

@@ -1752,27 +1752,30 @@ year      = {2020},
 type      = {phdthesis},
 project = {concurrency},
 phdthesis = {Y},
-abstract = {The cloud has become popular for its low cost, high availability and
-high fault-tolerance-queue or de-queue, for example Amazon Web Service (AWS) and
-Google Cloud Platform (GCP. Those cloud infrastructures provide fixed interface,
-to hide the complex internal implementation that consists of hundreds of thousands
-of machines globally that work together as a whole system, known as a distributed
-system. Clients of those systems only need to work with the abstract interfaces.
-Transactions are the de facto interfaces in modern distributed databases.
-Because of the CAP theorem, a distributed system must sacrifice strong consistency
-to achieve high availability and high fault-tolerance. Engineers and researchers
-have proposed many reference implementations in specific setting for various weak
-consistency models. However, there have been little work on formalising the interfaces.
-We introduce an interleaving operational semantics for describing such interfaces,
-with the focus on the client-observable behaviour of atomic transactions on
-distributed key-value stores. Our semantics builds on abstract states comprising
-centralised, global key-value stores and partial client views. We provide
-operational definitions of consistency models for our key-value stores which
-are shown to be equivalent to the well-known declarative definitions of consistency
-models for execution graphs. We explore two immediate applications of our semantics:
-specific protocols of databases for a specific consistency can be verified in
-our centralised semantics; programs can be directly shown to have invariant
-properties such as robustness results against a weak consistency model.},
+abstract = {Cloud computing has become popular for its low cost. A storage sub-system is a key component
+in many cloud computing infrastructures, and many systems have used so-called“NoSQL”
+databases, where data is often organised in a key-value structure, for example Dynamo DB,
+a distributed key-value store from Amazon Web Service (AWS). This is driven by the need
+to store unstructured data, such as pictures, videos, or documents. Similar to traditional
+relational databases, transactions are the de facto interfaces in cloud storages. Many distributed
+cloud storages often provide high availability and fault-tolerance, but adopt weak
+consistency, where individual server is allowed to operate without synchronisation in certain
+situation. Engineers and researchers have proposed various weak consistency models via reference
+implementations in their specific setting. However, there has been little work on formal,
+implementation-independent definitions of consistency models. We introduce an interleaving
+operational semantics, with the focus on the client-observable behaviour of atomic transactions
+on distributed key-value stores. Our semantics builds on abstract states comprising centralised,
+global key-value stores, representing the overall states of distributed systems and multiple, mutually
+independent, partial client views, representing client-observable states. In each step, a
+client with its view commits a transaction to the abstract key-value store, and this step must
+satisfy certain conditions of the chosen consistency model, called an execution test, which is a
+novel operational definition of this consistency model. We provide definitions of various well known
+consistency models such as snapshot isolation and causal consistency and show that our
+definitions are equivalent to the well-known declarative definitions of consistency models. We
+then explore two immediate applications of our semantics: specific implementation protocols
+can be verified in our operational semantics via trace refinement; client programs can be shown
+to satisfies invariant properties. These two applications show that our operational semantics
+captures the interfaces between client programs and implementation protocols.},
 }
 
 @InProceedings{Xiong2020Data,