The topic of this year’s seminar is “Advanced Research Topics in Blockchain Technology.” The blockchain has emerged as a novel distributed consensus scheme that allows transactions, code, and any other data, to be securely stored, executed, and verified without a centralized authority. For some time, the notion of blockchain was tightly coupled with Bitcoin, a well-known cryptocurrency. Today, there are a large number of blockchain systems creating complex socio-technological ecosystems. Some are simple variants of Bitcoin, whereas others significantly differ in their design and provide different functional and security guarantees. This shows that the research and industrial communities are in search of a simple, scalable, and deployable blockchain technology for various application areas. As such, the blockchain will likely induce considerable change to many systems and businesses. Distributed trust, and therefore security and privacy, is at the core of the blockchain technologies and has the potential to either make them a success or cause them to fail.

In this research-driven seminar, you will have the opportunity to explore this exciting research and development area and gain cutting-edge skills for your future research career development.

This seminar will help you:

1. Critically apply theories, methodologies, and knowledge to address fundamental questions in the seminar topics.

2. Pursue research project of significance in the seminar research area.

3. Demonstrate skills in oral and written communication sufficient to publish and present work in the field.

4. Follow the principles of the research and publishing ethics.

5. Demonstrate a mastery of skills and knowledge at the doctorate level in the seminar research area.

6. Interact productively with people from diverse backgrounds as team members with integrity and professionalism. (Within the scope of the course enrollment and project community collaboration.)

This is a research-driven seminar that will consist of a series of meetings that will be a combination of research discussions, project discussions, and coaching. The projects will fall in three broad categories (based on the Professor approval): a) original blockchain analytics study, b) original blockchain systems research, and c) original machine learning blockchain research.

There will be three 5 evaluations:

1. Project idea, abstract and introduction (as a proposal) (week 4; 10 marks; minimum 3 references)

2. Project background/related work, research method, and preliminary results (week 8; 20 marks; minimum 20 references)

3. Project final report (week 12; 40 marks; minimum 30 references)

4. Project presentation of another team’s project work and report (during last 3 weeks; 20 mins / 10 mins Q/A; 15 marks)

5. Project presentation (your work) (during last 3 weeks; 20 mins / 10 mins Q/A; 15 marks)

Core work instructions:

· Each team will consist of one member unless otherwise agreed up and approved by the course instructor.

· The strict deadline for the project report is the end of week 12. No work will be accepted after the deadline under any circumstances. As such, it is strongly recommended that you submit your work at least 24 hours in advance in order to avoid any last minute problems such as no network access, printers not working, etc.

· Minimum required length of the report is 15 pages for team of one member IEEE Transactions Latex template (this is around 30-40 pages Word double space)

· For final report, you must use the IEEE Latex Template (https://goo.gl/6f2aar). Documents formatted in anything but Latex and following any other template will not be accepted. See the sample documents for the exact rules. Please use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} (without option 'compsoc' or 'compsocconf'). All formatting, including tables, must be in Latex. Students like to use online editing tool https://www.overleaf.com/.

· You must submit electronic version of your report (Latex sources and PDF output) and a hard copy of your report.

· No academic dishonesty will be tolerated. Please refer back to MIT Academic Integrity Handbook (http://integrity.mit.edu/ ). Note the rules about paraphrasing.

· The report must be written in formal academic English. Please make sure that there are no syntax and grammatical errors.