Tasks, algorithms, and models of distributed computing with Michel (together with other colleagues)

In this talk, I describe some of the work I have donewith Michel (and others) over a very productive period that started 15 yearsago, and hopefully will last for many more years, where we have published anaverage of two conference papers and one journal paper per year, and have metmany times in Mexico, France and other places. I concentrate on our more recentwork on interval-linearizability, a notion we introduced to specify objectsmore general than the usual sequentially specified objects. While tasksexplicitly state what might happen when a set of processes run concurrently,objects only specify what happens when processes access the objectsequentially. Remarkably, these are two approaches that have largely remainedindependent since the early days of the theory of distributed computing. Idescribe the bridges we establish between these two paradigms, and ourdiscussions about what is a distributed problem, and what it means to solve it.