Modern geo-replicated databases underlying large-scale Internet services guarantee immediate availability and tolerate network partitions at the expense of providing only weak forms of consistency, commonly dubbed eventual consistency. At the moment there is a lot of confusion about the semantics of eventual consistency, as different systems implement it in subtly different forms, stated using disparate and low-level formalisms. Additional difficulties arise from the use of special conflict resolution policies or combinations of different consistency levels. All this complicates the implementation and use of eventually consistent systems.

Dr Yang is a University Lecturer (corresponding to an Associate Professor in the US system) in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford; and a tutorial fellow at Worcester College. He received a PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA (2001), and was a postdoc in KAIST and Seoul National University (2001-2006). He held a lectureship (corresponding to an Assistant Professorship in the US system) at Queen Mary, University of London (2006-2011) until he joined Oxford. He was also an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow from 2007 to 2012.