My research interests are broadly in systems and distributed computing.

My goal is to solve concrete problems that the software industry faces by designing solutions that are both provably correct and practical. My approach consists in designing provably correct protocols and then integrating them into practical systems to study their systems-oriented aspects.

Selected Publications

• Vertical atomic broadcast and passive replication
  Manuel Bravo, Gregory Chockler, Alexey Gotsman, Alejandro Naser-Pastoriza, and Christian Roldán
  DISC'24: International Symposium on Distributed Computing
  Extended version available as arXiv:2408.08702 [pdf]


• Liveness and Latency of Byzantine State-Machine Replication
  Manuel Bravo, Gregory Chockler, and Alexey Gotsman
  Distributed Computing, Volume 37. Springer, 2024
  Journal version of our DISC'22 paper [pdf]


• Making Byzantine consensus live
  Manuel Bravo, Gregory Chockler, and Alexey Gotsman
  Distributed Computing, Volume 35. Springer, 2022
  Journal version of our DISC'20 paper [pdf]


• UniStore: A fault-tolerant marriage of causal and strong consistency
  Manuel Bravo, Alexey Gotsman, Borja de Régil, and Hengfeng Wei
  USENIX ATC'21: USENIX Annual Technical Conference
  Extended version available as arXiv:2106.00344 [pdf]


• Reconfigurable atomic transaction commit
  Manuel Bravo, and Alexey Gotsman
  PODC'19: Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
  Extended version available as arXiv:1906.01365 [pdf]


• Hourglass: Leveraging Transient Resources for Time-Constrained Graph Processing in the Cloud
  Pedro Joaquim, Manuel Bravo, Luís Rodrigues, and Miguel Matos
  EuroSys'19: European Conference on Computer Systems
  


• Distributed transactional reads: the strong, the quick, the fresh & the impossible
  Alejandro Z. Tomsic, Manuel Bravo, and Marc Shapiro
  Middleware'18: International Middleware Conference
  


• Saturn: a Distributed Metadata Service for Causal Consistency
  Manuel Bravo, Luís Rodrigues and Peter Van Roy
  EuroSys'17: European Conference on Computer Systems
  


• Unobtrusive Deferred Update Stabilization for Efficient Geo-Replication
  Chathuri Gunawardhana, Manuel Bravo and Luís Rodrigues
  USENIX ATC'17: USENIX Annual Technical Conference
  


• Cure: Strong Semantics Meets High Availability and Low Latency
  Deepthi Akkoorath, Alejandro Tomsic, Manuel Bravo, Zhongmiao Li, Tyler Crain, Annette Bieniusa, Nuno Preguiça and Marc Shapiro
  ICDCS'16: International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems
  

Activities

• Member of program committee: ICDCS 2025, PaPoC 2025, SERIAL 2020, DAIS 2019, PaPoC 2019, OPODIS 2018


• Journal reviewer: Springer Distributed Computing, IEEE TPDS: Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Internet Computing, IETE Journal of Research, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Journal of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience


• External reviewer: DISC 2024, PODC 2024, DISC 2023, DISC 2022, PODC 2021, OPODIS 2021, SRDS 2021, PODC 2020, PODC 2019, PODS 2019, ICDCS 2018, OPODIS 2014

Funding

Awards and scholarships:

• Juan de la Cierva-Incorporación, 2022-2025
• Juan de la Cierva-Formación, 2020-2022
• Ayuda para la atracción de talento investigador (Community of Madrid Grant), 2018-2020
• Portuguese Doctoral Grant, 2017-2018
• Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Fellowship, 2013-2016
• European Master Scholarship, 2011-2013

Managed projects:

• Systematic Design of Blockchain Consensus Protocols, 2020-2022
  Tezos Foundation, Principal co-investigator

Teaching

General teaching experience:

• Teacher Assistant for INGI1131 Concepts of Computer Languages
  BSc in Computer Science, Universite Catholique de Louvain, 2014 and 2016

Supervision experience:

• Borja de Régil (2021) at IMDEA Software Institute and Universidad Complutense de Madrid
  BSc thesis supervision (co-supervised with Alexey Gotsman)
• Christian Roldán (2021) at IMDEA Software Institute
  Postdoc supervision (co-supervised with Alexey Gotsman)
• Viet Bui (2018) at Université Catholique de Louvain
  Master thesis supervision (co-supervised with Peter Van Roy)
• Pedro Joaquim (2017) at Universidade de Lisboa
  Master thesis supervision (co-supervised with Luís Rodrigues)
• Vincent Dagnely (2017) at Université Catholique de Louvain
  Master thesis supervision (co-supervised with Peter Van Roy)
• Chathuri Gunawardhana (2016) at Universidade de Lisboa
  Master thesis supervision (co-supervised with Luís Rodrigues)
• Carlos Bartolomeu (2015) at Universidade de Lisboa
  Master thesis supervision (co-supervised with Luís Rodrigues)
• Gayana Chandrasekara (2015) at Universidade de Lisboa
  Master thesis supervision (co-supervised with Luís Rodrigues)
• Iwan Briquemon (2014) at Université Catholique de Louvain
  Master thesis supervision (co-supervised with Peter Van Roy and Zhongmiao Li)