SERIAL '20

4th Workshop on Scalable and Resilient Infrastructures for Distributed Ledgers (SERIAL 2020)

December 8th, 2020 ‒ 16.00h to 20.00h CET (GMT +1)

Program

See the event start in your time zone.

  • 16:00‒16:05 Welcome

  • 16:05‒16:40 Invited Keynote #1

  • 16:40‒17:10 Session 1
    • Scalable log auditing on private blockchains via lightweight log-fork prevention
      Yuzhe Tang, Kai Li, Yibo Wang (Syracuse Univ.), Sencer Burak Somuncuoglu (Chainalysis)
    • Healthor: protecting the weak in heterogeneous DLTs with health-aware flow control
      Jonas Theis (Vrije Univ. Amsterdam, IOTA Found.), Luigi Vigneri (IOTA Found.), Lin Wang, Animesh Trivedi (Vrije Univ. Amsterdam)

  • 17:10‒17:20 Coffee break

  • 17:20‒17:55 Invited Keynote #2

  • 17:55‒18:25 Session 2
    • FPGA-based consensus in permissioned blockchains
      Man-Kit Sit (City Univ., Hongkong), Manuel Bravo, Zsolt István (IMDEA Software Inst., Madrid), Ray Cheung (City Univ., Hongkong)
    • Using homomorphic hashes in coded blockchains
      Doriane Perard, Xavier Goffin, Jérôme Lacan (ISAE-Supaero, Univ. de Toulouse)

  • 18:25‒18:35 Coffee break

  • 18:35‒19:15 Panel
    • The role researchers play in shaping the future of Blockchains
      Panelists: Adrian Brink (Cryptium Labs), Carsten Binnig (TU Darmstadt), Jesus Ruiz (Alastria), Maria Potop-Butucaru (Sorbonne Univ. & LIP6 Lab.), Marius Poke (Agreement Solutions), Yvonne-Anne Pignolet (DFINITY)

Attendance

The event will be virtual. If you like to attend, please register at the Middleware web site. Leave your e-mail address there, and you will get contact addresses to attend our workshop. We are looking forward to seeing you there.

Keynotes
  • Public-permissioned blockchains: some infrastructure requirements from common use cases
    by Jesus Ruiz (Alastria)
    • Abstract:A Public-Permissioned blockchain network combines permissioning with a decentralized governance model, allowing the blockchain to be managed as a Common Good. The network is general-purpose, should not be controlled by any single company or group of companies, but it is permissioned to comply with all relevant regulations and to be efficient and sustainable. We describe some typical use cases and the requirements they pose on the infrastructure, including the consensus algorithm, consistency model or concurrency of operations.
    • Bio: Jesus Ruiz is a member of the board and CTO of Alastria. Alastria is the first and biggest public-permissioned blockchain network with the aim of accelerating the digital transformation of all sectors of the economy. He is also part of the technical governance group of EBSI (European Blockchain Services Infrastructure), the initiative from the European Commission and Member States to enhance the provision of cross-border services from public administrations to citizens and businesses. He started his career 35 years ago in IBM designing, developing and implementing distributed operating systems for banking networks.

  • Efficient asynchronous payments
    by Yvonne-Anne Pignolet (DFINITY)
    • Abstract: In this talk, we discuss how payments can be executed in a distributed setting reliably and efficiently. Based on the recent insight that consensus is unnecessary to prevent double-spending, we present Astro, a system solving this problem in a decentralized, deterministic, and completely asynchronous manner. Instead of consensus, Astro relies on a weaker ordering primitive—Byzantine reliable broadcast—enabling a simpler and more efficient implementation than consensus-based payment systems. Astro maintains performance robustly, even when a fraction of the replicas are compromised or slowed down by an adversary.
    • Bio: Yvonne-Anne Pignolet's work is centered around distributed systems, ranging from the design and analysis of algorithms for reliable and efficient distributed systems despite failures and malicious behaviour to complex network analysis. After her PhD at ETH Zurich in 2009 she was a postdoc at IBM Research Zurich and Ben Gurion University, Be'er Sheva. In 2019 she joined DFINITY after 8 years at ABB Corporate Research as a Principal Scientist.