Protocol Labs research funding recipients 2021, part 2

Jonathan Gross

Groups: AbstractionLab, Cryptonet, ResNetLab

Areas: Cryptography, Distributed systems, Metaresearch, Networking

Last week we introduced you to the researchers pursuing key problems in cryptography via RFP-009, RFP-010, and a Nucleation Grant. Now we are excited to share the recipients of research awards intended to fund proposals from PhD candidates, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty through our open grant offerings.

Here is a summary of the five PhD fellowships, three postdoctoral fellowships, and one Implementation Grant given in the latest review round (applications submitted in September 2021). If you are interested in submitting a proposal for consideration, please see grants.protocol.ai for more information and to apply.

PhD Fellowships

PhD Fellow: Arantxa Zapico, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

• Advisor: Carla Rafols
• Abstract: Vector commitment constructions come from either an algebraic or Merkle tree approach. The latter usually comes with better efficiency while the former is more flexible. This project aims to design a framework that can unify existing algebraic constructions without sacrificing efficiency.

PhD Fellow: Dennis Trautwein

• Advisor: Bela Gipp
• Abstract: This research project investigates how a super-peer architecture can complement the IPFS network for content discovery and retrieval. The architecture should respect user privacy and ensure low latency access to content.

PhD Fellow: Joachim Neu (Stanford University)

• Advisor: David Tse
• Abstract: My research studies attacks on peer-to-peer (P2P) layers, improves resilience of P2P protocols, and devises new provably Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) protocols under adversarial behaviors.

PhD Fellow: Mikel Cortes, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)

• Advisor: Leonardo Bautista-Gomez
• Abstract: This project focuses on analyzing the performance and security of blockchain network components and developing a tool to monitor distributed libp2p networks in real-time.

PhD Fellow: Varun Madathil, North Carolina State University

• Advisor: Alessandra Scarfuro
• Abstract: Aiming to mitigate attacks in decentralized storage networks (DSNs) by hiding client-server matches and ensuring only capable servers participate in the protocol.

Postdoctoral Fellowships

Postdoc: Akira Takahashi (PhD, Aarhus University)

• PI: Markulf Kohlweiss, University of Edinburgh
• Abstract: This project focuses on designing an efficient lattice-based polynomial commitment scheme (PCS) to construct modern zk-SNARKs that are quantum-resilient.

Postdoc: Lior Rotem (PhD, The Hebrew University)

• PI: TBD
• Abstract: The project aims to understand the security guarantees of succinct proofs of knowledge and propose new constructions for arguments of knowledge with better provable security bounds.

PI: Harald Vranken, Open University of the Netherlands

• Postdoc: TBD
• Abstract: The project quantifies and reduces the environmental footprint of distributed systems utilizing consensus mechanisms, focusing on energy consumption and other environmental impacts.

Implementation Grant

Team: Joel Chan (University of Maryland), David Vargas

• Abstract: This project explores novel interactive tools that integrate the authoring and sharing of discourse graphs to synthesize scientific knowledge and accelerate discovery.