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SUMMARY:IC Colloquium: Why Blocks and Why Chains\; A First Principles (Re)
 Design of Blockchains
DTSTART:20181119T161500
DTEND:20181119T173000
DTSTAMP:20260407T105600Z
UID:020c18854ad379ad59fd8b22a85a810bcec9f0d225b1b1ab12486e4f
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:By: Pramod Viswanath - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champa
 ign\nVideo of his talk\n\nAbstract:\nToday's blockchains do not scale in a
  meaningful way. As more nodes join the system\, the efficiency of the sy
 stem (computation\, communication\, and storage) degrades\, or at best sta
 ys constant. Furthermore\, the security of the permission less system imp
 oses limitations on the core performance metrics of throughput\, latenc
 y and confirmation probability. We take a first principle approach to the 
 blockchain ecosystem addressing each of the various components holistical
 ly. Our approach is characterized by seeking fundamental limits  (those
  prescribed by the physics of the underlying network) to performance a
 nd designing algorithms that attain them.  This research is informed by 
 decades of experience in information theory\, coding theory\, algorithms\,
  wireless communication and packet networks.  This talk will highlight k
 ey outcomes of this research program\, including\nPrism (a new consensus a
 lgorithm that guarantees information theoretically optimal throughput\, l
 atency\, reliability)\,Spider (a new networking protocol for off-chain pay
 ment channels)\, Polyshard (a new coded storage architecture)\, and Dande
 lion (a new network privacy layer).\nReferences: \nhttps://arxiv.org/ab
 s/1810.08092\nhttps://arxiv.org/abs/1809.10361\nhttps://arxiv.org/abs/1809
 .05088\nhttps://arxiv.org/abs/1809.07468\n\nBio:\nPramod Viswanath receive
 d the Ph.D. degree in EECS from UC Berkeley in 2000. From 2000 to 2001\, h
 e was a member of research staff at Flarion technologies\, NJ. Since 2001\
 , he is on the faculty at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in El
 ectrical and Computer Engineering\, where he currently is a professor.  H
 e is a coauthor\, with David Tse\, of the text Fundamentals of Wireless C
 ommunication\, which has been used in over 60 institutions around the worl
 d. He is coinventor of the opportunistic beamforming method and codesigner
  of Flash-OFDM communication algorithms adapted into fourth-generation cel
 lular systems.\n \nHis current research interests are in blockchain techn
 ologies from a variety of angles: networking protocols\, consensus algorit
 hms\, payment channels\, distributed coded storage and incentive designs. 
 He is co-founder and CEO of Applied Protocol Research\, a startup doing re
 search on  blockchain technologies. Applied Protocol Research  is sta
 ffed by academics (professors\, PhDs\, and intern graduate students)\, wit
 h a wide variety of backgrounds (EE/CS/ECON covering both theory/systems) 
 from different institutions (Berkeley\, CMU\, Illinois\, MIT\, Stanford\,
  USC\, UW-Seattle).  This talk is joint work by the speaker with: Mohamm
 ad Alizadeh (MIT)\, Salman Avestimehr (USC)\, Giulia Fanti (CMU)\, Jiantao
  Jiao (Berkeley)\, Sreeram Kannan (UW-Seattle)\, Sewoong Oh (Illinois) and
  David Tse (Stanford). \n\nMore information
LOCATION:BC 420 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%20420
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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