In the last decade, blockchain technologies and decentralized autonomous organizations have slowly, but constantly, evolved from being an almost internet underground crypto movement to becoming an emerging mainstream phenomena. Since its inception in 2009, with the computation of the first genesis block of bitcoin, this technology demonstrated the tremendous resilience that open and decentralized systems based on trustless techniques can have. The potential disruptive impact of decentralized blockchain based systems involves heterogeneous aspects of the economic, social, and scientific development of our life, including: a world-wide alternative to the physical gold-standard, a cross-border censorship resistant medium of exchange, smart contracts to implement an ecosystem of intelligent objects and users interacting with each other without the need of a central authority, digital art, and decentralized finance (DeFi). This workshop aims to tackle the complexity of such topics by giving a technical overview of the main concepts behind a blockchain, starting from the basic explanation of the cryptographic foundations and the game-theory related aspects that make it possible. Finally, in a second part of the workshop, concrete examples of existing decentralized systems will be demonstrated as part of an hands-on session.

• Physical vs Digital assets: the double spending problem
• Exchange of value in human history
• Motivations for an open blockchain
• Key concepts: Hash Functions and Asymmetric Cryptography
• Proof-of-work in Bitcoin
• Difficulty Adjustment
• Mining, Blocks and Transactions
• Tools visualizing and exploring the blockchain
• Bitcoin as a Platform: the Lightning Network
• Bitcoin and altcoins: the trilemma
• Ethereum and Smart Contracts
• Blockchain and IoT
• Proof-of-existence, NFT

Dr. Davide Patti Assistant Professor Electric, Electronics and Computer Engineering Department University of Catania, Italy.

Dr. Davide Patti is currently an Assistant Professor at the Electric, Electronics, and Computer Engineering Department, University of Catania. He has published several works on Design Space Exploration, Low-power techniques for Embedded Systems, and Network-on-Chip architectures. He has been teaching several courses in the Computer Science field, including Human-Computer Interaction at the Faculty of Psychology of Kore University, Enna, Italy and lectures at the University of Southampton, UK. He is a Steering Committee member of International Workshop on Network on Chip Architectures (NoCArc). He is also Associate Editor of IEEE Access and Guest Editor of many special issues. He is co-author of the Noxim project, currently used by a vast community of researchers working in the area of on-chip communication systems and employed as an experimental platform in more than 500 scientific papers published in refereed ACM and IEEE international conferences and journals. Davide Patti: Home Page , Google Scholar

• Workshop will be conducted in online mode through MS Teams platform.
• Total duration of the workshop is 6 hours, spanning across two days.
• Date: 22.07.2021 (Thursday) and 29.07.2021 (Thursday)
• Session timings: 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM & 5:00 to 6:30 PM (IST)

The workshop is open to

• UG, PG and Ph.D students & faculty computer science, electronics and related area.
• Technical personnel from R&D organisations/industries and technical staff working in R&D projects.

• There is NO REGISTRATION FEE. Only limited seats are there and will be filled by First Come First Serve Basis.
• Interested candidates are requested to submit the Application Registration Form on or before 17.07.2021. One person can fill the registration form only once.
• Application Registration Form
• Provisional list of shortlisted candidates will be displayed on this website on 18.07.2021 based on applications received till then.
• All shortlisted candidates have to confirm their seats on or before 20.07.2021 as per the directions given.
• Candidates who have submitted their application are requested to check this website on 18.07.2021 for completing the confirmation process.
• MS Teams link to join the workshop will be emailed to only those candidates who confirm their registration.
• E-certificates will be provided to only those participants who attend all sessions of the workshop.