Speaker:

Ian Taylor

Title: The Curation, Interfacing and Analysis Lifecycle of Blockchain Applications

Abstract: 

In this talk, I will focus on the lifecycle of Web3 applications, describing ways in which next generation decentralized applications can be orchestrated, curated, executed and analysed. I will introduce the talk by presenting research on cryptocurrency analysis we’ve been working on at Notre dame, which involves using Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and graph analysis algorithms to extract features from cryptocurrency transactions. I will then generalize this to set the context of how such approaches will work for the wider community of emerging Web3 applications. I will then discuss community tools that are used to curate Web3 applications and then present how the SIMBA Chain platform can be used to curate, record and analyze data from Web3 applications. Finally, I will discuss some use cases that SIMBA Chain has been applied to, including coffee tracking, NFT Marketplaces, and multi-chain Department of Defense scenarios where graph approaches are used to search data.

Short Bio: 

Ian Taylor is a research fellow at the AIRC at Stevens institute and the CTO of SIMBA Chain.  He is also  a research professor, currently on leave, at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of Notre Dame. Taylor obtained a degree in computing science, a Ph.D. studying neural networks applied to musical pitch, and designed and implemented the data acquisition system and Triana workflow system for the GEO600 gravitational wave project. He now specializes in blockchain, open data access, web dashboards/APIs and workflows.  Ian has published over 180 papers, 3 books, with 10000 citations (h-index 44) and he won the Naval Research Lab (NRL) best research paper (ALAN Berman) prize in 2010, 2011 and 2015.  Taylor also acts as general chair for the WORKS workshop on workflows at the annual Supercomputing Conference and, in 2018, he was on ICO Alert's list of "Top 40 Blockchain Influencers."

Speaker:

Elisabetta Di Nitto

Title: Infrastructure as Code: State of the Art and Practice, Challenges and Possible Solutions with Model-Driven Engineering

Abstract: 

The deployment of cloud applications and the correct management of their lifecycle is a critical and complex task. As part of the DevOps tactics, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) provides the ability to create, configure, and manage complex infrastructures by means of executable code. Writing IaC, however, is not an easy task, since it requires blending different infrastructure programming languages and abstractions, each specialized on a particular aspect of infrastructure creation, configuration, and management. Moreover, the more software system architectures become large and complex --think, for instance, at Data-Intensive or Microservice-based architectures-- the more dire the need of IaC becomes. In this talk I’ll provide an overview of the state of the art and practice in IaC, and of the main challenges in this area. Furthermore, I’ll show how model-driven approaches can help addressing some of these challenges.

Short Bio: 

Elisabetta Di Nitto is Full Professor at Politecnico di Milano. Elisabetta’s expertise lies in the area of software engineering and, in particular, of large-scale, open, service-oriented systems with a special attention to the techniques to make these systems self-adaptable to the changes in the environment and in the performances of its distributed components, and to enable them to identify and incorporate new components at runtime. Recently, she has been focusing on supporting the development, deployment and operation of data-intensive applications and on Cloud Computing and, in particular, on how to design applications that can run on multiple clouds in order to limit vendor lock-in and to increase availability and reliability of such applications. Elisabetta has published more than 150 papers in journals and in the proceedings of the most important conferences in the area of software engineering. She has been member of the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology and of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Moreover, she has been general chair of ESEC/FSE 2015 and ICAC 2018 as well as program co-chair of ASE 2010, ServiceWave 2010, SEAMS 2020, and ACSOS 2022.

https://dinitto.faculty.polimi.it/

Speaker:

Ittay Eyal

Title: Blockchain Incentive-Based Security 

Abstract: 

The security of blockchain protocols critically relies on incentive compatibility. This talk will review the basic principles of game-theoretical analysis of blockchain protocols and recent results. It will focus on our novel protocol, Colordag (link below), which achieves a strict Nash Equilibrium with high probability. 

Ittai Abraham and Danny Dolev and Ittay Eyal and Joseph Y. Halpern. Colordag: An Incentive-Compatible Blockchain. https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/308

Short Bio: 

Ittay Eyal is an Senior Lecturer (Assistant Prof.) in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty at Technion. Eyal completed his PhD at Technion, followed by a post-doctorate at Cornell University. Eyal was awarded a 2018 Alon Scholarship and a 2022 Krill Prize. His research focuses on performance and security in decentralized systems.