Wyatt Meldman-Floch, CTO and cofounder of Constellation Labs discussed the integration of Big Data and Blockchain technology, elastic infrastructure and MEME, an approach for maintaining elasticity in blockchain/DAG clusters created and used by Constellation Labs.  Attendees got to connect with the LA blockchain & the Hyperledger community.
Read ahead here.

Sia is a decentralized storage platform powered by blockchain technology. David Vorick, who is the CEO, co-founder, and lead developer of Sia, and Manasi Vora, Head of Product Strategy, visited USC to introduce Sia and its technical components. To learn more about. please visit the following link: https://sia.tech/.  

IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency is a technical conference on blockchain sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc). The conference was held in South Korea on May 2019. Prof. Bhaskar Krishnamachari, faculty at USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the director of Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things (CCI), and Gowri Ramachandran, a postdoctoral researcher at CCI, presented three papers at the conference.

USC hosts the second edition of the symposium on foundations and applications of blockchain (FAB) on the 5th of April.  

USC Marshall School of Business organizes a Blockchain accelerator at USC in partnership with IBA.

Please see ArXiv.

Some more details here.

Learn more details about the hackathon at here.

See more details here.

Read more details about this here.

See arXiv preprint here.

Learn more details about this Hyperledger meetup hosted at USC online at https://www.meetup.com/Hyperledger-Los-Angeles/events/253795098/

The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance held an all day meeting of the Telecom SIG at USC, in conjunction with Mobile World Congress Americas being organized in LA this week. For more information see https://entethalliance.org/events/eea-telecom-worksession-meeting-mobile-world-congress-americas/

USC CCI Researchers have posted the preprint of a paper on ArXiv providing the first mathematical analysis of Token Curated Registries (TCRs) using Game Theory. TCRs are a new crypto-economic mechanism that have been recently proposed to provide decentralized curated lists for applications ranging from digital advertising (such as the adChain system developed by MetaX) to restaurants and more.

USC CCI hosted Pasadena-based ObEN to give a presentation about their work on Personal AI on the Blockchain.

The USC Information Technology Program (ITP) is offering two courses on Blockchain in Fall 2018. ITP 256 “Blockchain”, taught by Prof. Nitin Kale, is now a regular course. ITP 499, “Blockchain: Smart Contracts and Decentralized Applications” is a new offering taught by Eric Chung, founder of DApperNetwork. For more info including syllabus, please see https://classes.usc.edu/term-20183/classes/itp/

Dr. Virgil Griffith, Research Scientist at Ethereum Foundation came to give a talk at USC, hosted by Viterbi CCI. The talk covered open problems related to Ethereum and Blockchain technology in general. You can find a link to Virgil’s slides in the following page.

This article by Hyperledger showcases interns they are hosting this summer. Two of them, Shuo Wang and Martin Espinoza are graduate students at USC.

Dr. Gowri Ramachandran, Kwame Wright and Prof. Bhaskar Krishnamachari from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering have released source code for Trinity, a solution that integrates distributed publish-subscribe brokers with Blockchain, for a solution that allows easy deployment of blockchain-based supply chain solutions. Trinity allows for IoT devices to stream measurements and inputs that are verified through a smart contract before being added to a ledger. Subscribing devices can be assured that the stream of data they are getting are consistent with what’s on the immutable ledger and ordered in the same way. While extendable to other software, Trinity has been initially implemented using an open source MQTT broker (Mosquitto) and the open source Tendermint permissioned blockchain protocol.

This blog post by Lewis Daly on Medium gives an accessible introduction to the Streaming Data Payment Protocol (SDPP), proposed recently by USC researchers to enable easy design of client-server applications on the Internet where clients can pay in real-time for streaming content (from IoT sources or even media servers). SDPP combines traditional TCP-based communication with a cryptocurrency for payments and the use of a distributed ledger for records.

Karan Motwani, Manager of Application Development at Starbucks Coffee Company gave a talk at USC on developing Blockchain applications.

April 20, 2018: A team of Researchers from USC, UCLA, Emory, and Duke Received 150,000 USD for Blockchain-based Patient Data Exchange Platform.

Professor Bhaskar Krishnamachari: Blockchain Technology and its Discontents
Thursday, April 12th, 7:30pm-9:00pm
USC, Zumberge Hall (ZHS) – 159
Blockchain and related technologies have created a lot of excitement and there are many innovative ideas in the air to apply them to various domains. Professor Bhaskar Krishnamachari will offer an overview of where the state of the art in terms of technology is and several challenges that remain to be addressed from a technical perspective, including reducing transaction costs, improving transaction volumes, balancing anonymity with AML regulations, reducing price volatility and speculation, increasing software security, interoperability, etc. As food for thought, his presentation will highlight some critical perspectives that argue that blockchains may not be the solution to all the world’s problems.
About Professor Bhaskar:
Bhaskar Krishnamachari is Ming Hsieh Faculty Fellow and Professor in Electrical Engineering with a joint appointment in Computer Science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He is the Director of the USC Viterbi Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things, as well as the Autonomous Networks Research Group. He has co-authored over 300 papers that have been collectively cited over 20,000 times. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, and the ASEE Terman Award for outstanding EE educators. He was listed in Popular Science Magazine’s “Brilliant 10” in 2015, and in the TR-35 list of top 35 innovators under 35 in 2011.
Slides can be found here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1bg5_cCuZMU2PeeQAzrlAzdOMYmvaibCyG_aPw5mOpR0/edit#slide=id.p

Dr. C. Mohan, from IBM Almaden, who is a distinguished researcher and an IBM, ACM, and IEEE Fellow gave a talk on “Landscape of Practical Blockchain Systems and their Applications” at USC Viterbi CCI.

USC, CCI, the Trojan Blockchain Society, and the LA Blockchain Lab are pleased to host an evening of Everything Blockchain with Michael Casey, Chairman of CoinDesk, Chris Cannucciari, Director of “Banking on Bitcoin,” and Paul Vigna, Cryptocurrency Reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
Michael Casey, CoinDesk Chairman
Michael Casey is a Senior Advisor at MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative, where he heads research into blockchain applications that advance financial inclusion and energy efficiency. He also holds a position as senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
Formerly a journalist at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter, bureau chief, managing editor and eventually a columnist covering global economics, Casey keeps his hand in the media business via a role as Chairman of the Advisory Board at CoinDesk, the leading media outlet and events coordinator for the digital asset and blockchain industry. He is the author of five books, including The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything, which he recently published with his co-author Paul Vigna. It was a follow-up to a prior collaboration from three years earlier, The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order.
Paul Vigna, “Wall Street Journal”
Paul Vigna is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and has been a journalist for more than 25 years, as a reporter, editor, and photographer.
He currently covers the cryptocurrency sector, including bitcoin, other digital currencies, and blockchain-related technologies. He formerly was an equities reporter on the MoneyBeat blog, writing about markets, economics, and finance. He was host of both the MoneyBeat show, a daily live webcast, and the MoneyBeat podcast. He also writes about television and arts, with a weekly recap column for “The Walking Dead.”
He has spoken extensively across media, including CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox and Fox Business, and PBS. He has spoken at both South by Southwest and New York Comic Con, and myriad other conferences. He is a frequent guest on podcasts, including Chuck Todd’s 1947 Podcast and Barry Ritholtz’s Masters in Business.
He is co-author, along with Michael J. Casey, of “The Age of Cryptocurrency” (2015, St. Martin’s Press) and “The Truth Machine” (Feb. 27, 2018, St. Martin’s Press).
He is also author of “Guts: The Anatomy of The Walking Dead,” (October 2017, Dey Street Books).

The big bet of Ethereum, is whether Proof of Stake (PoS) can eliminate Proof of Work (Pow) and provide a more efficient way to achieve distributed consensus. This will lead to a breakthrough, redefining (again) how blockchain applications work, scale and even impact our environment. We’ll talk about how PoW works, we’ll analyze PoS and it’s impact in the blockchain world and how you can start your own node.
Basic understanding of Ethereum and Python is recommended.
Who is Jon Vlachogiannis?
Jon V built the first teleportation device in 4300 and is frequently traveling back in time to talk about things that will change the future. Or the past. During his travels, he builds epic companies, invests in awesome ones and writes code that (sometimes) writes code on its own. You can find him giving presentation at Stanford, United Nations, various tech and startup events and near KOI 7711 – his favorite planet.
Location: KDC 236

There were two tutorial presentations – one by Nitin Kale, and the other by Bhaskar Krishnamachari .
Video recording of the event
Read more about it here:
http://cci.usc.edu/index.php/2017/11/28/blockchain-technologies-a-tutorial-for-engineering-faculty-and-researchers/

The Symposium on Foundations and Applications of Blockchain (FAB’18),  co-organized by USC Viterbi faculty and to be hosted at USC in March 2018, is a new venue for presentation of innovative academic+industry research and work on blockchain.  Long and Short Papers are due December 15, 2017! Please help us spread the word!

Prof. Bhaskar Krishnamchari was invited to speak at a panel on Blockchain technologies on day 2 of the World Funding Summit, held at the Los Angeles Covention Center.

The LA Blockchain Lab, a partnership with the UCLA Blockchain Lab, and the USC Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and The Internet of Things, is creating a community of blockchain advocates on a mission to increase awareness, advance progress and foster the development of blockchain technology. Members agree to increase civic engagement among all citizens; advance technological progress; link classrooms to burgeoning careers; and foster economic opportunities across Southern California. The Lab’s strength comes itself from associated forms of vigorous difference or diversity: they are intellectual, cultural, and economic––to name but three.

Blockchain Innovation Night, part of the 2018 Innovation Week at USC hosted industry experts and student researchers in order to discuss and educate those in attendance about blockchain technologies.

The newly formed Trojan Blockchain Society held an information session for USC students interested in Blockchain.

Heidi Pease, Co-Founder of LA Blockchain Lab & Homesidekick was hosted for a talk at CCI on the current state of Blockchain technologies, applications and the blockchain ecosystem in Los Angeles.

A graduate-level reading and discussion group focused on understanding the engineering elements of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies from a technical perspective, including reading of state of the art research papers related to blockchains (spanning various perspectives: cryptography, network protocols, distribute consensus and network economics) started in USC Viterbi, by Prof. Bhaskar Krishnamachari. It is hoped that this will lead to a graduate seminar on blockchains in the near future. See reading list.

Prof. Nitin Vasant Kale started a new course in the Information Technology Program at USC Viterbi, on Blockchain. See syllabus.