Course abstract
Blockchain is an emerging technology platform for developing decentralized applications and data storage, over and beyond its role as the technology underlying the cryptocurrencies. The basic tenet of this platform is that it allows one to create a distributed and replicated ledger of events, transactions, and data generated through various IT processes with strong cryptographic guarantees of tamper resistance, immutability, and verifiability. Public blockchain platforms allow us to guarantee these properties with overwhelming probabilities even when untrusted users are participants of distributed applications with ability to transact on the platform. Even though, blockchain technology has become popularly known because of its use in the implementation of Cryptocurrencies such as BitCoin, Ethereum, etc., the technology itself holds much more promise in various areas such as time stamping, logging of critical events in a system, recording of transactions, trustworthy e-governance etc. Many researchers are working on many such use cases such as decentralized public key infrastructure, self-sovereign identity management, registry maintenance, health record management, decentralized authentication, decentralized DNS, etc. Also, corporations such as IBM and Microsoft are developing their own applications in diverse fields such as the Internet of Things (IoT), etc., even enabling blockchain platforms on the cloud.
Considering the need to disseminate the emerging concepts for students, we decided to prepare a new course on blockchain technology platforms and applications.
Course Instructor
Professor Sandeep K. Shukla is an IEEE fellow, an ACM Distinguished Scientist, and served as an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor during 2008-2012, and as an ACM Distinguished Speaker during 2007- 2014. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Embedded Systems, and associate editor for ACM transactions on Cyber Physical Systems. In the past, he has been associate editors for IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, IEEE Design & Test, IEEE Embedded Systems Letters, and many other journals. He has guest-edited more than 15 special issues for various IEEE and ACM journals. He has written or edited 9 books, published over 200 journal and conference papers. He has been program chairs for 4 IEEE/ACM International conferences, and General Chair for 2 of these conferences. He has served on the program committee of more than 100 international conferences and workshops. He supervised 12 PhDs, and directed five post-doctoral scholars at Virginia Tech. Sandeep's current research focus is on Cyber Security for Critical Infrastructures. He is coordinating a research center on cyber security for critical infrastructures along with his colleagues at IIT Kanpur at the moment. He received his bachelors degree in Computer Science and Engineering at Jadavpur University, Kolkata in 1991, his Masters and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Albany, NY, USA in 1995 and 1997 respectively. He worked as a scientist at the GTE labs on telecommunications network management, distributed object technology, and event correlation technologies between 1997 and 1999. Between 1999 and 2001, he worked at the Intel Corporation on the formal verification of the ITANIUM processor, and on system level design languages. 2001-2002, he was a research faculty at the University of California at Irvine working on embedded system design. From 2002 till 2015, he has been an assistant, associate, and full professor at Virginia Tech, USA. He co-founded the Center for Embedded Systems for Critical Applications (CESCA) in 2007, and has been a director of the center between 2010 and 2012. In 2015, he joined the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India. He is currently the Poonam and Prabhu Goel Chair Professor, and Dr.Deep Singh and Daljeet Kaur Faculty Fellow at IIT Kanpur. He received the Ramanujan Fellowship from the Science and Engineering Research Board, Government of India, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from the White House in 2004, Frederich Wilhelm Bessel Award in 2008 from the Humboldt Foundation, Germany, Virginia Tech Faculty Fellow Award, A distinguished Alumni Award from the State University of New York at Albany, A best paper award at the Asia-Pacific Design Automation Conference, GTE Laboratories Excellence Award,ASEE/ONR Faculty Fellowship in 2005, ASEE/Air Force Senior Faculty Fellowship in 2007, and an Air Force Labs Faculty Fellowship in 2008. Sandeep also has been a visiting faculty at INRIA, France, University of Kaiserslautern in Germany, MIT, and University of Birmingham UK for various periods of time.
Teaching Assistant(s)