PhDSupervision:VolkerStrobel

General Information

Personal

Name: Volker Strobel

Birthdate: 10 November 1987

Belgian mobile phone: +32 483 42 21 04

Belgian home adress: Avenue Wielemans Ceuppens 138, 1190 Forest / Bruxelles

ULB-related

PhD started: 7 September 2016

Matricule ULB: 000443899

Office phone: +32-2-650 27 12

Work Schedule

Lab Responsibilities

• IRIDIA server maintenance

Tutorials

• Udemy: Ethereum Developer: Build A Decentralised Blockchain App Completed 75 %
• Coursera: Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies

FRIA

• Presentation
• Ideas for next proposal: Ideas

Meetings

Meeting 27/9/2016

• Continue literature research (read papers mentioned in FRIA proposal)

• Find out which labs are doing blockchain / cryptocurrency / cryptography research (see Google Docs)

Meeting 4/10/2016

• Propose literature (see separate page)
• Séance d'information sur les financements permettant des mobilités dans le cadre d’un doctorat [1][2][3]
• Practice presentation with Marco, Yasu, Gaetan, and Ken (Volker - Comments of Marco, Yasu, Gaetan, and Ken)

Meeting 18/10/2016

• French language course Mon 31 October - Fri 4 November?
• iMAL Blockchain symposium & showcase Friday 4 November 2pm - 6pm (0 EUR) -- http://imal.org/en/activity/blockchain-fact-fiction-future/
• iMAL Hacklab Saturday 5 November (30 EUR)

Intermediate Meeting

• French language course Mon 31 October - Fri 4 November time: 9am - 1pm

Meeting 15/11/2016

• Continued literature research
• Started first web application for smart contracts (http://164.15.10.140/) with very basic functionality:
  • Robots can be added to the swarm
  • Miner can issue a premium in Ether as incentive for removing oil
  • Oil can be removed by pressing a button -> sender gets rewarded
• Experimented a bit with ARGoS
• Discussed points during the meeting:
  • I need a convincing problem/application that absolutely requires the blockchain (could be very different from the oil spill removal task)
  • Look into PoW/PoS/PoX algorithms and see which one is best for robot swarms (also look into "Physical Proof of Work"); since robots are computationally rather limited, we need a clever consensus algorithm, otherwise, an attacker could easily perform a 51% attack; also find out which cryptocurrencies use which algorithm; see if it is possible to switch to PoS in Ethereum
  • Investigate possibilities for light clients (e.g., each city/organization could have a node that maintains the blockchain and the corresponding robots just run light clients)
  • I can use the footbot simulation for now but will probably use the e-puck in the real experiments

Meeting 22/11/2016

• Created simple interface between ARGoS and Ethereum
• Possible application scenario:
  • Robots work remotely, without real-time supervision (e.g., deep sea, planetary exploration, or underground)
  • Robots should be fully autonomous (that is no single point of failure, no one can just press a button and stop them)
  • The swarm can add new members at any time
  • Robots possibly belong to different organizations (e.g. collaboration between different countries)