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Notre Dame PhD CRC - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Interoperability
      - Scalability
- - - - Strategy
        
        Talk about your academic background, motivations (learning), and interests (Blockchain: Scalability & Privacy).
    - - Strategy
        
        Course work (such as network security, Blockchain BTS course, All the security course and connections)
        
        Projects I did
        
        The conference and OSS development experience
      - Similar Q: Why do you think you are a good candidate for this program
        
        I’ve been interested in this topic since the final year of my undergraduate degree. This lead to my choice of Masters and helped me pick my dissertation topic, which I really enjoyed. I’m really excited to now go on and do some sustained research in this area as a PhD student.
      - Hyperledger Supplychain development (keywords: access control, basic deployment)
      - Hyperledger Benchmarking on AWS clusters (learn how to build clusters)
      - Interoperability and scalability paper abstract + privacy & cryptography on Blockchain (DiffPriv + ZKP) + AI Security & security background + Machine Learning & NLP + Math major lots of modeling + System Design components & architecture basics
    - - Strength
        
        Very motivated and love to take action. (Before the start of my internship project, I already went though all the issues, and even helped to community to solved the Caliper deployment issue caused by access permission error from NPM). I love to take action as soon as possible.
        
        I’m very comfortable in adapting to new environment, and I can very quickly get into a new group of people, and start to collaborate with them. (I once joined a Seattle Blockchain startup weekend before I go to grad school with a team that formed by big tech company employees and hedge fund managers. But I can still confidently propose my ideas to them, and we go the first place out of 50 other teams in that year)
      - Weaknesses
        
        Don’t like to get help from others. (Project version different question)
      - Summary
        
        I feel that I’m very motivative in working independently, and love to absorb knowledge from textbooks and structured resources. But, I’m not always good at asking for help, and this can cause me too much time to solve a problem sometimes. So now I’m more open to ask for help from others, and always do my best to share my experience in solving problems.
    - - When I just get in to College, I found a professor in the first semester, and did a self-research project with him. I was assigned to a PhD student of him.
        After I did my research for one month, my professor ask why I didn’t make any progress. I was a little bit confused, since I already submitted some of my works to the PhD student. Then I noticed that in his presentation slides, my work was actually included, and I didn’t receive a credit from it.
        I realized that when I submit my work, all I do it send to the PhD student. So I went to him and ask why that happened. Turns out he though my work is too simple, so he though it’s not necessary to specifically give me credit for that.
        After that, I talk with the professor directly for all of my work, and I started a new direction from scratch. In that semester I was taking 4 other CS classes, and I never give myself a time to rest. But eventually I submitted the work on time, and got a perfect feedback from my professor.
      - Better example with Caliper PR
        
        After I finished my summer internship with the Linux Foundation for the Hyperledger caliper project, I was going to submit my work to the Github with a Pull Request to the main folder of the project. Then I did something extra: I updated all the packages in that project fold with NPM...
        Now I accidentally add more tasks to myself out of no where, since the project is due very soon, and the Travis CI tool on Github simply gave me a Bunche of new testing error logs that I didn’t know how to deal with.
        I immediately asked my mentor and another main contributor of the project for help. They helped me to check the log and found that the dependencies are not matching, then they realized what mistake I made. So they sent me the original form of the dependency versions from their sides. And I fix all of them by finding and fixing them one by one...
        After this lesson, no matter what decision I make, and not just for projects, I will ask another person to help me to see from another perspective about my decisions, so that I can see if I missed anything.
        And I also learned that I should always do comprehensive testing before I submit any work, and stop being rushing in change everything.
    - - Strategy
        
        Just list the potential difficulty based on your project experience, and more importantly, how you are going to work through them
      - Similar Q: are there any training needs you can identify ahead of your PhD?
        
        I’m really interested in communicating my research with people in business that do care about the development of Blockchain technology. But I don’t have enough financial and business background to accurately understand their needs, so I want to have some training to help me be able to meet and communicate with the correct end users.
        I also might need some help in advanced CS topics to optimize the performance of my research.
      - Better
        
        I can see that to make blockchain more interoperable, I will need more advanced knowledge in distributed system and database. So I’m hoping to undertake training in related CS fields and seek advice from my supervisor as I develop these key skills early in my project.
    - - Strategy
        
        My background
        
        My interests and how it relates to Blockchain reserach
        
        What inspired me to do a PhD, and why this university and city attracts me.
      - Answer
        
        I’ve always being passionate about learning, and this passion guided me to push my limit in exploring new things and join different events.
        Before I go to grad school in Purdue, I did several Blockchain hackathon and startup weekend in Seattle and New York. Those experiences opened my mind, and helped me to see how creative can people be when a new technology came out.
        So I decided to do a Master with a focus on the basics of blockchain, which are Security and Cryptography. And I’m lucky enough to meet many professors that also passionate about Blockchain research. I did many interesting guided researchse with them in different areas of Blockchain. Those includes supplychain Blockhcian deployed on Hyperledger for car components, Hierarchical-Determininistic Wallet implementation, Blockchain Privacy and Security, and ERC223 token on Ethereum Rainkeby testnet (Proof-of-Authority PoA + faucet).
        I can explain more about why ERC223 is better: (ERC223: is a superset of ERC20 interface, and this new interface requires contracts to implement transfer function to handle the unknown transfer, and send them back if not match the type of the token, which was the main issue to cause ERC20 interface to make sent token to be stuck in the contract with no way to get them out.)
        I also joined several international Blockchain conferenceS in New York and Phoenix, both self-funded and as an invited guest speaker. It’s from there that I met my first group of early adopters to this new technology, and they gave me the confidence and passion to devote my time and energy in discovering more in this field.
        Now after all these experiences of researches, conferences, and contribution to the open source Hyperledger Blockchain project, I want to dive in more, and create more tools for people that trust in this field, and help them to develop their dream products more easily.
  - - - Strategy
        
        Unique feature of the university: the awesome student group (willing to help each other, and the perfect potential user group for project prototypes: the Mendoza Business School. Since I can directly discuss with business major students and learn their needs and concerns about my research)
        
        Department and professor resources (learn and summarize)
      - This PhD matches my existing research interests perfectly. But I’m also attracted by the involvement of the project with people that already working on existing use cases. I know you both have a successful startup project that focusing on the Supply chain blockchain solutions for different industries. And my project experience and passion are exactly in that direction, and now I want to make the Blockchain more scalable and interoperable, so that it can solve more real work business issues like supply chain management and counterfeit product filtering.
    - - Strategy
        
        Conveying your enthusiasm for the subject
      - I really enjoy all the works I’ve done so far, but I really feel I’ve got more to offer as an independent researcher. I’m also passionate about this subject so much, that I wish to pay more attention to the questions I didn’t have chance to address enough.
    - - Before I graduated from college, I already start to join all kinds of Hackathon and Startup weekend that dedicated to Blockchcain. I also did several big projects relates to Blockhcian, and contributed to the largest consortium Blockhcian Framework project.
        From all the experience of myself, and many experts in this industry, I realized that the best way for me to contribute to this field, is to dining deeper, and solving some of the bottleneck problems that prevent the general public from adopting this technology.
        (Summarizing problèmes from the selected papers: Privacy, Scalability, Interoperability, accountability, UI/UX, etc.)
        This March I was also invited to talk about the benchmark project that I contributed to the community, and I got lots of insights from people joining the Forum.
        People are still trying to find the right tool to build a solution, but currently there is still not very clear way to develop and scale a Blockchain solution that can let people easily interact with each other, and learning insights from their performances and data.
    - - I feel this project is the best of its kind, the faculty of blockchain research combined research, with real work supply chain use cases solutions. I was already familiar with the work of my prospective supervisor and their research and project has greatly informed my own development as a scholar.
        I’m eager to combine my work with theirs and make use of the facilities the university has put together for this project.
    - - I’m eager to take advantage of the facilites and expertise this university has to offer. But I also want to contribute my own expertise and enthusiasm. My previous work with the Linux Foundation for the Hyperledger Caliper project gave me a clear idea about how to implement Dashboard for blockchain benchmarking from front end to Backend API.
        My Master program in Purdue gave me strong background in every perspective of Security, and my own research in the Blockchain Security and AI security gave me knowledge to be a valuable help for the research project in ND.
  - - - Strategy
        
        A clear top option for research direction (Scalability, etc.), and a written proposal!!! (Down is the key)
        
        If they ask why, then summarize your conference experience, and the AWS Fabric benchmark data with Caliper. (plus all the use cases in Hotel management: they want it to be easier to use, and can saving deployment costs. But the root problem is that scaling this system requires too many organizations to be aware of it
        
        Synchronous développement environment is not good, try to make the chain development asynchronous, such that organization can be added automatically (or with notification policy), but don’t need to accept all request all the time.
        
        Summarizing the main topics on Hyperledger and Consensus Scalability issues.
        
        What to scale (Dive Deep into System design and Data Intensive app)
        
        Throughput
        
        Storage
        
        Caching efficiency and replica synchronization
        
        Security and data loss prevention
    - - I really want my work to directly impact the field of Blockchain, especially when we are in such an early age. So I will be very willing to be in consultancy position, or contributing to the product design and development in competitive tech companies.
        But I’m open to other options too.
      - Non-academic career for PhD holder
        
        I feel my PhD project can open up my curiosity and ability to help others. So I want to use my knowledge to help other people to do research or projects, and I want to be a consultant for other technology companies or my own business startup.
        But I’m happy to keep other options open.
    - - In-depth discussions about research and think on your own
      - Describe study hypotheses and research design for projects that you would like to pursue. (Articles you have read)
      - Passion
        
        Several directions before I decide: Scalability, Privacy (for data sharing), Efficient Data Extraction, etc.
      - What I know
        
        How to share data between channels?
        
        How to preserve the privacy?
        
        How efficient is the transaction now?
      - :red_flag: The reason I'm doing this PhD is my belief that Blockchain can eventually change the way people doing all kinds of transactions, and making groups and people sharing their information in a new level based on trust.
        So my passion is in the salability and privacy of the blockchain architecture. I want to make sure that I can find a way to push the industrial world forward by providing practical guidance to implement this scalable, reliable, and secure Blockchain System.
        I want to know every since bit about how to correctly building the architecture of Blockchain to make is scalable in both TPS, and Storage efficiency.
        And I want the data in this system maintain high confidentiality, integrity, availability, and authenticity.
    - - Best (mention this impact even without asking)
        
        I’m keen to share my passion for this subject with a wider audience. One of my main motivations to do this PhD, is because I found lots of passionate people in this industry, and I’m one of them. But they are facing troubles that need people to spend their time to resolve, and I want to push this field forward faster with my efforts.
        I’m hoping to maintain a public-facing blog documenting my research and would also be keen to approach more audience in the world with live-broadcasts. So that people can move forward and create more value in this industry.
        And that also map to my post PhD career goals, that is to be in a consultancy role, and helping other people to do research and accomplish more in a more efficient way.
  - - - Types
        
        In addition, there are several ways in which you may augment your stipend through competitive fellowships:
        
        Truly exceptional students are nominated for University-level fellowships, such as the Notebaert Premier Fellowship, the Clare Booth Luce Fellowship, the Arthur J. Schmitt Presidential Fellowship, and others as they become available. These fellowships offer stipends between $35,000 and $40,000 per year.
        
        All Ph.D. students are encouraged to apply for a variety of external fellowships from both industrial and government sources. These fellowships typically pay the student's stipend and also offer opportunities such as summer internships and conference travel.
        
        Google Fellowship (Open in 11/01 apply and 03/01 result)
        
        Full time grad student pursuing a PhD (I’m in US so it’s fine)
        
        Completed graduate coursework by the Fall of the award year, when the Fellowship begins. (3 rd year of PhD)
        
        Remain enrolled full-time in the PhD
        
        Not already supported
        
        Not from Google related family
        
        Materials
        
        Student CV with links to website and publications
        
        Short (1-page) CV of the student’s primary advisor
        
        Transcripts of current and previous academic records
        
        2-3 letters of recommendation (at least one from the thesis advisor)
        
        Research / dissertation proposal including references (maximum 8 pages)
        
        Student Essay response (350-word limit) to:
        
        Describe the desired impact your research will make on the field and society, and why this is important to you. Include any personal, educational and/or professional experiences that have motivated your research interests.
        
        Describe an example of your leadership experience in which you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes or contributed to group or contributed to group efforts over time.
        
        2 more items...
        
        Microsoft Fellowship (Open in July for nomination application, then by the end of August you will know if you can progress)
- - - - SIMBA provides a fully integrated platform that brings together multiple tooling in a simple environment. It supports auto smart contract generation using a GUI, smart contract API generation, seamless off-chain multiple file support for transactions, access control layers for enabling authorization to the on-chain and off-chain data, a full asynchronous transaction signing implementation, including wallet integration, and multiple blockchain and data store implementations. Currently we support the Ethereum, Quorum and Stellar Blockchains, and the IPFS and Ceph datastores.
      - Focuses
        
        Security of Blockchain (Consortium)
        
        :red_flag: Bulletproof
        
        Supply chain counterfeit product prevention
        
        Digital Business Transformation (Deloitte Report Summary)
        
        My GUI development experience as a pro experience
        
        Converting to Microservices and cloud testing tool
        
        Make that online! A starter 3000! The secure bot
        
        My question is how this can guarantee the system of supply chain will not be exploited by attacker or user? Since people might not follow the rules! (Input data is fake)
        
        ZKP
        
        Data Management between Distributed DB
  - - - Research Computing
      - Complex Collaborations
      - Science Team Building
      - Management
      - Strategic Planning
    - - LinkedIn
        
        SIMBA Chain
        
        Passion: Supply chain management and data extraction and management + Scalability
        
        Deeply dive into the use case needs from end users
        
        Hotel management system company CEO, he collaborate with more than 500 boutique hotels, and what to be able to transforming information with less friction. Because all the systems are not connected.
- - - - Fabric (awesome)
        
        Performances Metrics Constrains
        
        Consensus Algorithm (RAFT, PBFT)
        
        Graphic Distribution of Nodes
        
        Hardware Environment of all peers (CPUs, Memory, etc.)
        
        Network model (Complexity and firewalls, etc.)
        
        Number of nodes under the test (all the nodes or just some nodes like Endorsers)
        
        Software component dependencies
        
        Test tools and frame works
        
        Type of data store used (CouchDB, LevelDB, etc.)
        
        The workload and logic of the test script
        
        Scalability
        
        Reliable Consensus Algorithms
        
        TPS
        
        Efficient Sharding (instead of replication)
        
        Architecture of Fabric
        
        FastFabric: Scaling Hyperledger Fabric to 20,000 Transactions per Second
        
        Hyperledger Fabric: A Distributed Operating System for Permissioned Blockchains
        
        Blockchain Architectures
        
        System Design Ability (Love it)
        
        3,000 TPS type application
        
        Throughput
        
        Storage
        
        Caching
        
        LB
        
        20,000 TPS type Application
        
        Throughput
        
        Storage
        
        Caching
        
        LB
      - Data base internal
      - Designing Data Intensive Applications
    - - ZKP
      - Network Securities
      - Ethereum Top 10 Vulnerabilities Attacks and defense
        
        Reentrancy is one of the most famous ones
        
        Gas price drop caused the fallback function call state change possible: only 2300 gas is assigned for fallback function call. And before the Constantinepole version of the Ethereum came of, state change requires about 5000 gas, but after that the gas to change state is only about 200 gas. so it's possible.
      - AI Security
      - Dandelion++
        
        Protecting again the Routing level deanonymization attack to the node IP address by delaying diffusion of the transaction information.
        
        Attack method: triangulating attack with super nodes deployed near the large mining pools
        
        Dammage: targesting rich individuals, eavesdropping business or individual actions, etc.
      - Differential Privacy
        
        For the differential privacy, I want to let users be able to submit works on blockchain and still maintain a level of privacy.
        To accomplish that I did some small research with the adult dataset set the contains each persons background data and income data.
        I use logistic regression to classify the groups between people with income lower than 50K and higher than 50K. The original accuracy is about 78%, and after applying some differential privacy functions, the test accuracy is still as high as 65%.
        The accuracy and privacy trade off can be tuned with an epsilon parameter. The higher the parameter, the higher the accuracy, but also means less privacy. This value is normally in between 0 and 1.
    - - ERC223 Tokens
        
        Pros
        
        Cons
        
        Pitfalls
      - Car Component Supply chain with Fabric
        
        Pros
        
        Cons
        
        Access Controls
        
        Pitfalls
        
        Process
        
        Logic
        
        Design Patterns in System Implementations
        
        For example we can use simple factors patterns to get the objects of type of manufactures and dealer.
        
        Roles
        
        4 organizaations
        
        Supplier for the car components
        
        Manufacture
        
        Dealer
        
        Car
        
        Goal
        
        Making sure that no counterfeit components will be accidentally used for the car by manufacture or dealers.
        
        We should map cogent operation functions to the roles
        
        Only Supplier is allowed to
        
        AddComponent: Because this is the only organization in these 4 know whether a specific new component is added to the Car or not. The other 3 don't have enough information to know that.
        
        Transfer Component to the Manufacture
        
        Manufacture
        
        MountComponent, ReplaceComponent, RecallComponent, TransferComponent
        
        Dealor
        
        TransferComponent
        
        Car
        
        CheckComponent: see if that is valid and match the model.
        
        Set up the endorsement policy when you instantiate the chaincodes
        
        For example you need to split the chain code so that the AddComponet is a single function is a script file (such as written by go).
        You can use the getCreator API function provided by the Fabric SDK to check which organization is calling from . Then based on the access control policy you can determine whether to allow it to run or not.
        
        Each tx also need to have endorsor. For example TransferComopnet might require supplier and manufacture to agree to be finished.
    - - Components of Blockchain Framework
        
        Blockchain Security Protocol
        
        Blockchain Network Protocol
        
        Blockchain Consensus Protocol
      - Proposed
    - - Supply chain
      - [Business Lifecycle Management System w/ Secure Assets tracking for secure analytics internally and externally]
        
        Hard points
        
        When business information is put online or on chain, the goal is to share with others. But the problem is that, business information have some different between general data: they are private, sensitive, only shared with small parties, and vary by groups.
        Then people need to use these information for better decision making. So that could be the incentive to share, but that doesn't guarantee the incentive to give the real information. On the contrary, since most of the business information involve conflict of interests, the system used to manage business information and lifecycle must be accomplished by Byzantine Fault Tolerant algorithms and Zero-knowledge Proof.
        But the problem of these two system is that they are still not easy to setup even for people to specialty in these field, and the cost to run and scale them in real business use cases is high.
        Thus my goal is to try to find ways to make they more user friendly for businesses, and more scalable with the promise of security and data privacy.
        But I'm happy to open to other research opportunity too, and I can start in anytime as long as I can get the I-20 soon enough.
        
        How to synchronize the business workflow in physical work with the state on the blockchain is a challenge. Since human error and fake inputs can cause problems. Also the privacy of data is not guaranteed really well. That's why ZKP is necessary.