Title: Benchmarks and Models for Blockchain
Time: 12:30
Location: Room A, Building Zeta
Type: Research talk
Speaker:  Aad Van Moorsel
Abstract:  Blockchain is a highly popular paradigm for non-centralized applications, especially in finance and trade. Performance is a major challenge for blockchains, since consensus approaches are known not to scale. In this presentation we address blockchain performance, from the perspective of model-based prediction as well as benchmark-based assessment. We introduce blockchains and illustrate the main performance issues. We present research results about smart contracts in the Ethereum blockchain and discuss the requirements for generic benchmarks for blockchain performance.
Author bio: Aad van Moorsel is a Professor at the School of Computing in Newcastle University. He worked in industry from 1996 until 2003, first as a researcher at Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill and then as a research manager at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, both in the United States. He got his PhD in computer science from Universiteit Twente in The Netherlands (1993) and has a Masters in mathematics from Universiteit Leiden, also in The Netherlands. After finishing his PhD he was a postdoc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA, for two years. He is the author of over 100 peer-reviewed research papers, and holds three US patents. His research group at Newcastle University conducts research in security, privacy and trust, with applications in payment, blockchain and smart systems. The group’s research all contains elements of quantification, be it through system measurement, predictive modelling or on-line adaptation.