[talks] TODAY November 29, 4:30pm, E-Quad B205 - Pramod Viswanath, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

[Emily Lawrence]

EE SEMINAR SERIES

 

 


Speaker: 

Pramod Viswanath, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


Title: 

Why Blocks and Why Chains; A First Principles (Re)Design of Blockchains


Day: 

Thursday, November 29, 2018


Time:

4:30 pm


Room: 

B205 Engineering Quadrangle


Host:

Prof. Naveen Verma


 

 


Abstract:

Today's blockchains do not scale in a meaningful way. As more nodes join the
system, the efficiency of the system (computation, communication, and
storage) degrades, or at best stays constant. Furthermore, the security of
the permission less system imposes limitations on the core performance
metrics of throughput, latency and reliability. We take a first principle
approach to the blockchain ecosystem addressing each of the various
components holistically. Our approach is characterized by seeking
fundamental limits (those prescribed by the physics of the underlying
network) to performance and 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 key outcomes of this research program, including:

Prism (a new consensus algorithm that guarantees information theoretically
optimal throughput, latency, reliability), 

Spider (a new networking protocol for off-chain payment channels), 

Polyshard (a new coded storage architecture), and 

Dandelion (a new network privacy layer).  

 

References: 

https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.08092

https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.10361

https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.05088

https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.07468


 

 


Bio:

Pramod Viswanath received the Ph.D. degree in EECS from UC Berkeley in 2000.
>From 2000 to 2001, he 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 Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he
currently is a professor.  He is a coauthor, with David Tse, of the text
Fundamentals of Wireless Communication, which has been used in over 60
institutions around the world. He is coinventor of the opportunistic
beamforming method and codesigner of Flash-OFDM communication algorithms
adapted into fourth-generation cellular systems.

 

His current research interests are in blockchain technologies from a variety
of angles: networking protocols, consensus algorithms, payment channels,
distributed coded storage and incentive designs. He is co-founder and CEO of
Applied Protocol Research, a startup doing research on  blockchain
technologies. Applied Protocol Research  is staffed by academics
(professors, PhDs, and intern graduate students), with 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: Mohammad Alizadeh (MIT), Salman
Avestimehr (USC), Giulia Fanti (CMU), Sreeram Kannan (UW-Seattle), Sewoong
Oh (Illinois) and David Tse (Stanford).

 

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