IC3 Fall Retreat 2019

Friday November 22, 2019 – 4 JPM Chase Metrotech Center, Brooklyn, NY 11245 5th Floor, Room 514

IC3 faculty, students, sponsors, and guests gathered at the IC3 Fall Retreat at the JP Morgan Metrotech Center to discuss the major technical challenges, issues and innovative solutions to widespread blockchain adoption. Researchers from CMU, Cornell, Cornell Tech, ETH Zurich, EPFL, UC Berkeley, UCL, UIUC, and the Technion were all present along with representatives of IC3’s industry partners.

Andrew Miller IC3 2019 Fall Retreat
Prof. Andrew Miller, UIUC and IC3 Associate Director welcomes the retreat attendees before the start of the first session on Smart Contract Architectures (please see agenda below).
IC3 2019 Fall Retreat Group Photo
Attendees gathered for a group photo after the final session of the day.

There were 28 talks from faculty and students across the globe and a compelling Town Hall led by Prof. Andrew Miller (please see overview at bottom of the agenda).

Ample breaks were scheduled for follow up discussions and networking. The Retreat was capped off by a dinner at the nearby Kimoto Rooftop Restaurant and an after-party at the aptly named Endswell.

Please see the detailed agenda below.

IC3 2019 Fall Retreat Agenda

8:00 – 8:45 Continental Breakfast

8:45 – 9:00 Welcome

9:00 – 9:50 Session 1: Smart Contract Architectures

  • Steven Goldfeder - Private Smart Contracts
  • Surya Bakshi - Saucy - Smart Contracts and Universal Composability
  • Ethan Cecchetti - Information Flow Language for Smart Contracts
  • Phil Daian - Complete Knowledge and Bribery in Smart Contracts
  • Mahimna Kelkar - Retroactive Time in Blockchain

9:50 – 10:10 Break

10:10 – 11:00 Session 2: Consensus and Related Topics

  • Emin Gun Sirer - Beyond Blockchains and Proof of Work: Part I
  • Kevin Sekniqi - Beyond Blockchains and Proof of Work: Part II
  • Yan Ji - Mining Discouragement Attack: Part I
  • Michael Mirkin - Mining Discouragement Attack: Part II
  • Hanyun Xu - Blockchain Sharding Consensus

11:00 – 11:20 Break – 20 min

11:20 – 12:00 Session 3: Markets

  • Amani Moin - A Taxonomy of Stablecoins
  • Haoqian Zhang - Toward a Better Monetary System
  • Patrick McCorry - Off-chain Markets
  • Peng Gao - HyperService: Interoperability and Programmability Across Heterogeneous Blockchains

12:00 – 1:00 Lunch

1:00 – 1:40 Session 4: Security and Zero-Knowledge

  • Tiancheng Xie - Libra: Succinct Zero-Knowledge Proofs with Optimal Prover Computation
  • Jiaheng Zhang - Transparent Polynomial Delegation and Its Applications to Zero Knowledge Proof
  • Sarah Meiklejohn - Tracing Transactions Across Cryptocurrency Ledgers
  • Andrew Miller - Blockchain and Peer Review

1:40 – 2:00 Break

2:00 – 2:30 Session 5: Messaging & Computation

  • Harjasleen Malvai - SEEMless: Secure End-to-End Encrypted Messaging with Less Trust
  • Tom Yurek - HoneyBadgerMPC and AsynchroMix: Practical Asynchronous MPc and its Application to Anonymous Communication
  • Ye Zhang - Publicly Auditable MPC

2:30 – 3:00 Session 6: Off-Chain Data

  • Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias - Brick: Asynchronous State Channels
  • Fan Zhang - Decentralized Oracles
  • Sai Krishna Deepak Maram - CANDID Decentralized Identities

3:10 – 3:30 Break

3:30 – 4:10 Session 6: Town Hall (see below) – Input from IC3 Sponsors on IC3 Research Priorities, Projects, Tech Transfer, Modes of Engagement, and Social Impact – Professor Andrew Miller

4:10 – 4:50 Session 7: Applications

  • Sishan Long - Blockchain for Social Good
  • Itay Tsabary - Just Enough Security: Reducing Proof-of-Work Ecological Footprint
  • Lun Wang - Data Capsule: A New Paradigm for Data Privacy
  • Dawn Song - Decentralized Federated Learning on Blockchain

4:50 – 5:00 Closing Remarks

6:00 – 8:00 Dinner – Kimoto Roof Top Restaurant

8:00 – 11:00 After-Party – Endswell

Town Hall Session Overview: An open discussion forum led by Prof. Andrew Miller (IC3 Associate Director) to get feedback and input from our industry partners and faculty membership. The following topics are suggested to seed the conversation. Please ponder this beforehand and come with questions and comments at the ready!

  1. Our tremendous research progree speaks for itself, (e.g., see our website), but let’s review our grand challenge problems and goal setting. How shall we set our priorities and focus areas for the next year?
  2. What are the most important upcoming problems for which the current progress and research directions are not yet addressing?
  3. How are we doing at transitioning our research to practice, and what opportunities should we exploit to do this more? I will discuss an emerging plan, called “Blockchain as a Clinical Practice”, or “Blockchain for Social Good”, in which we take an active role in leading social benefit projects to deploy our research.