Technical review and projects
Option A: Programming Project
Timeline
- Topic proposal: Oct. 07, 2022
- Midterm submission: Nov. 21, 2022
- Final submission: Dec. 11, 2022
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. Only one submission, from the team leader, is needed for a group of multiple students. Your submission should mention the names of all team members. This applies to proposal, mid-term report and final report.
Deliverable
- Proposal (15%): one-pager (one line or a short paragraph) including the chosen topic and members in your team.
- Motivation of your proposed systems to build, like why do you want to use Blockchain? What benefit does Blockchain bring in your application
- Initial system design including system modules and assignment to team members.
- Mid-term report of project (35%): Mid-term needs to include the following elements
- System architecture, including detailed system modules, both on chain and off chain.
- Implementation progress. Describe what modules have already been implemented, which tools used in implementation, if possible, a demo with screenshots of your implemented system so far.
- Implementation plan. Describe what modules have NOT been implemented yet, and the assignment to team members to further the progress.
- Be as concrete and specific as possible. Bonus points will be given to students/groups with novel design/applications and concrete demos.
- Group with a good mid-term report will be given an opportunity to meet the instructor for further advises.
- Final report/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, video-shot if you have too many screens to show). We may sample some teams (but not all teams) to do the demo in person.
- The report should have a descriptive title.
- Describes what applications your system is to support? Why you choose to support this application? Why it matters? and who/what users can benefit from the application?
- Describe what specific functionalities your system enables (e.g., what's the input/output of your system)? What's the workflow of your system?
- Describe the system architecture? You may include a figure showing different system components and how they interact.
- If possible, describe your future plan.
Option B: Technology Review
Timeline
- Topic selection: Oct. 07, 2022
- Final submission: Dec. 11, 2022
Technical reports can also be done by teams. You can form teams of up-to three students.
Deliverable
- Proposal (15%): one-pager (one line or a short paragraph) including the chosen topic and members in your team.
- Final report (85%): Formal survey of the technology with no less than 10 pages (format: 12-point font size on single-spaced 8.5" x 11" pages). You should clearly lay out different topics studied in your report. 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.
- An example of a good technical review paper: [pdf]