Technical review and projects

Timeline

  • Topic proposal: Oct. 14, 2018
  • Midterm submission: Nov. 10, 2018
  • Final submission: Dec. 12, 2018

Students can work in groups. But once groups are formed, collaboration is only allowed within the group. More specifically, inter-group collaboration is prohibited. Each group can have no more than 3 people.

Deliverables

  • Proposal (15%): one-pager including abstract and team formation.
  • Mid-term report of technology review (35%): Formal survey of the technology with no less than 4 pages (format: 12-point font size on single-spaced 8.5" x 11" pages). In this preliminary report, you should lay out the structure of your report, like sections/subsections you are going to survey. For most sections, you can just put a title there. But there must be at least 1 or 2 sections you have finished surveying.
    • For instance, if you survey "techniques for Blockchain throughput", you can have sections for "on-chain techniques" including sharding, new consensus algorithms, etc. and sections for "off-chain techniques" including say payment channels and networks, etc. You should finish at least one section, say for payment channels and networks, you fill out the full survey text, describing related technologies in the lightning networks and state channels.
  • Mid-term report of project (35%): Design and implementation plan of your project. Be as concrete and specific as possible (e.g., the choice of Blockchain and clients). Bonus points will be given to students/groups with novel design/applications. If you have a preliminary implementation, that will reward you extra points as well.
    • Group with good mid-term report will be given an opportunity to meet the instructor for advises.
  • Final report (50%): Formal survey of the technology and project design & implementation, no less than 10 pages (the same format to mid-term report).
  • Final program/demo (50%): Demo needs to allow other people to reproduce your results.
    • The demo option is to include in your project submission the screenshots (or better yet, videoshot if you have too many screens to show). We may sample some teams (but not all teams) to do the demo in person.

Final deliverable

Here is a more detailed description of technology review: Topics can come from weekly lecture and class discussions as well as papers in the reading list. You are required write a technology review of 10-15 pages, including figures and references.

An example: Write a 10-page summary of the current state of work improving Blockchain throughput. The paper should address the following:

  • What is the overall thrust in terms of development and goals, or products and goals of industry in this area?
  • What technical solutions or standards exist: elaborate on them. Include protocols, data formats, and architectures.
  • State what problems remain to be solved and how the developer community is approaching them.
  • List any open problems.

Sample topics

Online document: [link]