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Greetings IC3 Friends😊!
The golden hues of autumn embrace us, and we're bursting with excitement to unveil our 2024 Winter Retreat in the serene landscapes of Switzerland - a confluence of blockchain learning and social activity. October stood out as an exceptional month for us, with our students and faculty receiving recognition for their innovative blockchain research. Our researchers are also actively participating in several remarkable programs. Dive in to discover more!
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Announcing IC3 2024 Winter Retreat in Switzerland! | |
We are thrilled to announce that the IC3 2024 Winter Retreat will once again take place in the picturesque surroundings of Les Diablerets, Switzerland! After the tremendous success of our previous retreats, we are excited to continue this tradition in the Swiss Alps. See the IC3 2023 Winter Retreat here. | |
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What to Expect:
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Engaging Discussions: Dive into insightful discussions on the latest advancements and trends in blockchain.
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Social Opportunities: Connect with fellow researchers, industry experts, and IC3 partners, fostering collaborations and friendships through networking and group activities.
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Breathtaking Scenery: Immerse yourself in the stunning natural beauty of Les Diablerets.
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Eligibility and Sponsorship Opportunity:
Please note that the winter retreat is an IC3 members event, limited to current IC3 partners, academic members, and fellows. Special exceptions will be made for industry professionals from companies sponsoring the winter retreat. Please reach out to IC3 Community Manager, Bria Han (jh2584@cornell.edu) to request sponsorship details and the application form. The sponsorship application is ONLY for non-IC3 members/partners, existing IC3 partners are invited to send up to 5 attendees to participate regardless of retreat-specific sponsorship.
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Latest in Awarded Research! | |
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🏆Best Student Paper Award at the 25th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems
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Do Not Trust in Numbers: Practical Distributed Cryptography With General Trust by Orestis Alpos (University of Bern), Christian Cachin, (University of Bern, IC3):
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The authors highlighted a limitation in current distributed or "threshold" cryptographic primitives, in which all parties are treated as identical, and correlated corruptions cannot be described. This study introduces a practical approach to generalize distributed cryptography to non-threshold assumptions. This enables administrators to define trust models using Boolean formula, which is then transformed into cryptographic encodings suitable for cryptographic primitives. By covering three general distributed cryptographic schemes: verifiable secret sharing, a common coin, and distributed signatures, the research showed that these schemes offer richer expressibility at no or insignificant extra cost.
🏆Best Paper at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) 2023
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Going Incognito in the Metaverse: Achieving Theoretically Optimal Privacy-Usability Tradeoffs in VR by Vivek Nair (UC Berkeley, IC3), Gonzallo Munilla-Garrido (Technical University of Munich), Dawn Song (UC Berkeley, IC3):
- The emergence of VR and the "metaverse" brings new privacy challenges. Recent studies highlighted by the authors reveal that VR users can be profiled and deanonymized, reminiscent of conventional internet risks, yet lacking comparable defense tools. The authors introduced an "incognito mode" for VR, harnessing ε-differential privacy, to strategically protect user data without undermining usability. When implemented as a Unity plugin across various VR apps, their tool markedly reduces potential privacy threats.
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IC3 proudly sponsored AFT 2023 (Princeton University, New Jersey) this year and our community members presented workshops and research presentations at the conference!
🌟Decentralized Credit Networks Workshop
IC3 Associate Director, Prof. Andrew Miller (IC3, UIUC) jointly with Prof. Aniket Kate (Duke University) co-organized "Decentralized Credit Networks" workshop at AFT 2023. A post-workshop writeup will be available soon and you can also review workshop details via the live tweets here.
🌟IC3 Talks at AFT 2023
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QuePaxa: Escaping the Tyranny of Timeouts in Consensus by Pasindu Tennage (EPFL, IC3), Cristina Basescu (EPFL, IC3 Alum), Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias (IST Austria, Mysten Labs, IC3 Alum), Ewa Syta (Trinity College), Philipp Jovanovic (UCL, IC3 Alum), Vero Estrada-Galinanes (EPFL, IC3), Bryan Ford (EPFL, IC3).
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🌟IC3 Alum Fan Zhang (Yale) is the Program Committee Co-chair, bringing global researchers for a comprehensive blockchain learning experience. See program details below:
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🌟IC3 Co-Director Prof. Ari Juels (Cornell Tech), will deliver the keynote talk Rethinking the 'D' in DAO: Voting-Bloc Entropy, Bribery, and Dark DAOs for ACM CCS Workshop on Decentralized Finance and Security
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Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are an appealing new way to govern communities through code. There's wide acknowledgment that the 'D,' i.e., 'Decentralization' in DAOs, requires active participation by diverse stakeholders. But how can we accurately measure such participation? In this talk, I'll introduce a metric called Voting-Bloc Entropy (VBE). A rethinking of standard metrics like token holdings, VBE offers a nuanced understanding of community dynamics within DAOs. It also yields new insights about how to preserve and increase decentralization. One such insight is a looming challenge: systemic bribery. To underscore the practical nature of this threat and the importance of countermeasures, I'll describe our implementation of a Dark DAO—a private market for vote-selling.
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FC'24 will be hosted at Curacao Marriott Beach Resort, Willemstad, Curaçao from March 4-8, 2024. IC3 faculty member Prof. Elaine Shi (CMU) is co-chairing this wonderful opportunity to engage with blockchain researchers from all over the globe!
🌟Chainlink Constellation Hackathon
IC3 industry partner Chainlink is running its biggest hackathon from November 8 to December 10, 2023. Constellation offers $350K in prizes across 7 core prize tracks such as DeFi, SocialFi, Tech for Good, On-Chain Solutions, and more. Register here today!
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The Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3)
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