Yiannis (Ioannis) is joining the Resilient Networks Lab, which he helped get off the ground after becoming an advisor to PL in July 2019. Yiannis is currently a fellow of the United Kingdom’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and a Lecturer at University College London, where he has worked on a number of topics within the broad field of networking, with a significant focus on Information-Centric Networking (ICN). Here’s more from Yiannis:

What path brought you to PL?

I have been working in the area of content-oriented/centric networks for the past decade. Although I started this line of work semi-accidentally (due to a work placement), I have increasingly become convinced that content-centric networking is the future of networking. This is one of the core values of the projects within Protocol Labs, primarily IPFS, but not only. At the same time, I have become increasingly concerned about centralisation or consolidation of Internet services. There is a pressing need to work towards decentralisation from the network protocol layer, as opposed to the application-layer only. This is also one of the core drivers when it comes to protocol design within Protocol Labs. The combination of the above thematic areas, both of which are in the core of PL work and culture, makes this an exciting movement to be part of!

What are you working on?

I’m glad to be part of the PL Research team and more specifically the Resilient Networks Lab (ResNetLab). I often like to define research as the task of finding solutions to problems that do not exist yet. I’m looking forward to supporting the engineering teams from a research standpoint, both with the challenges they are currently facing and with those they will face in the future. Some of the areas I will be contributing to are: content resolution and routing, DHT performance improvements, non-DHT routing optimisations, techniques to speed up content delivery and security for decentralised, and unstructured peer-to-peer network protocols.

What future technology are you most excited about?

Decentralised Content Delivery Networks! We will soon be reaching a tipping point where traditional Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) will need alternative architectures in order to sustain their infrastructure and business models. I believe that incentivised P2P networks through decentralised content storage and delivery markets will be the dominant technology to achieve that goal. Within PL, this is sometimes referred to as IPFS <-> Filecoin integration. There is a lot of work that needs to be done before we reach a mature state in this area - this is certainly an extremely intriguing challenge.