Our interdisciplinary researchers are committed to understanding and solving the challenges that face society today — and tomorrow.
APPLICATIONS IN SERVERLESS CLOUD COMPUTING
Creating new derivatives for new kinds of applications such as serverless cloud computing, which potentially allows for functions to be traded in a market. Applying algorithms and computational complexity to understand bounds for protocols for consensus and settlement.
BLOCKCHAIN FOR SOCIAL GOOD
Conducting research to develop software tools to efficiently and effectively analyze and derive actionable insight from blockchain and how to apply for he betterment of society.
CONSENSUS PROTOCOLS AND SCALABILITY
Currently, there are two fundamental challenges facing the wide adoption of blockchain-like technologies. One is the scalability of the network in terms of the efficiency and resiliency of its consensus protocol. The second challenge is how to provide a certain degree of transaction privacy which is a common requirement of most of real world applications.
CRYPTOGRAPHY, SECURITY AND ANONYMITY
Investigating scalability and attack resiliency of consensus protocols, and privacy of transactions in blockchain networks.
DATA MINING AND MACHINE LEARNING
Applying machine learning technologies to analyze blockchain data.
DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
A blockchain must not only create a tamper-resistant record of transactions, but also order them sequentially and validate them against accidental or intentional misuse. In permissioned blockchains, this is accomplished using a distributed consensus protocol, which requires expensive message passing between servers and limits performance. The research aims to relieve the scalability bottleneck in blockchain systems by exploring methods of reducing the message complexity of consensus protocols.
SMART CONTRACTS
One of the most promising applications of blockchain technology is smart contracts. However, smart contracts are difficult to write correctly and debug. Since smart contracts are stored on a blockchain, they cannot be easily patched (like traditional software) once a vulnerability is discovered. Developing techniques, methodologies, and case studies for trusted contracts which, compared to smart contracts, will provide an additional certificate to guarantee key properties such as no unintentional disclosure of sensitive information.
TESTING AND VERIFICATION
The following researchers work in areas including testing and verification.