Incentive and Privacy Mechanisms for Blockchain-assisted Mobile Ecosystems

Speaker:        Dr. Dimitris Chatzopoulos
                Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title:          "Incentive and Privacy Mechanisms for Blockchain-assisted
                 Mobile Ecosystems"

Date:           Thursday, 27 June 2019

Time:           10:00 am - 11:00am

Venue:          Room 1410 (near lift no. 25/26)

Abstract:

The proliferation of computationally capable mobile devices gave birth to
ecosystems where devices collaborate to improve users' quality of
experience and preserve their privacy. The effectiveness of such
collaborations depends on the characteristics of the selected devices, the
willingness of their owners to help and the privacy losses of each
participant. Thus, mobile systems need to adopt mechanisms that motivate
collaboration and compensate those who share their resources while
preserving their privacy. Research has proposed such mechanisms designed
to operate via centralized authorities.

I will discuss decentralized mechanisms that eliminate the need for
authorities and function via specifically designed consensus protocols.
These mechanisms enhance mobile ecosystems by facilitating the exchange of
resources and storing interactions between mobile devices. I will present
FlopCoin, a cryptocurrency operating as an incentive scheme for
computation offloading and OPENRP, a lightweight and scalable middleware
that provides a unified interface to mobile applications for reputation
exchange. Next, I will introduce LocalCoin, a cryptocurrency that requires
minimal computational resources and works with off-the-shelf mobile
devices accompanied with specifically designed consensus protocols
designed for mobile ecosystems that can guarantee essential properties of
a distributed ledger: persistence and liveness. Finally, I will introduce
mobile systems that integrate smart contracts to guarantee integrity and
transparency with applications on crowdsourcing, distributed file systems,
and privacy-preserving marketplaces.


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Biography:

Dimitris Chatzopoulos received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering
from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and his Diploma
and MSc in Computer Engineering and Communications from the University of
Thessaly, Greece. In 2014 he was a visiting researcher in EPFL and in 2016
in Cambridge University. He was selected to participate in the 5th
Heidelberg Laureate forum in 2017. Dimitris has published in several top
international conferences and journals including IJCAI, IEEE ICDCS, IEEE
Infocom, ACM Multimedia, and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. His
main research interests are in the areas of mobile computing,
privacy-preserving mobile systems, and blockchain-assisted mobile
applications.