RPI to advance blockchain technology with $360,000 grant – troyrecord

TROY, NY – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Oshani Seneviratne, director of health data research at the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications (IDEA), and Lirong Xia, associate professor of computer science, have been awarded $363,343 from the Algorand Foundation. The award is part of an $8 million grant to fund blockchain research through a project led by Vassilis Zikas, associate professor of computer science and security researcher at Purdue University.

The project, called the Multidisciplinary Educational Global Alliance for Algorand Center of Excellence or MEGA-ACE, will advance blockchain technology and address challenges in theory and application involving economics, social choice, cryptography and architecture. Algorand’s blockchain excels by solving the so-called “blockchain trilemma” by making the technology secure, scalable and decentralized. More than a dozen representatives from universities and the private sector participate in MEGA-ACE from around the world.

At Rensselaer, students will benefit from this award through graduate and undergraduate research opportunities, special events such as hackathons conducted in collaboration with the student-led RPISEC computer security organization group, and guest presentations on campus related to artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technologies by Algorand experts. Blockchain has far-reaching applications.

“With this funding, I will explore governance for blockchains and governance using blockchains,” Xia said. “My goal is to improve efficiency, fairness and incentives for groups of people to make collective decisions.”

Seneviratne’s research through this grant will focus on smart contracts, where the self-executing terms of an agreement are written into lines of code that will be executed on the Algorand blockchain to power next-generation decentralized applications.

“Blockchains offer the foundation for cryptocurrencies and decentralized ledgers,” Seneviratne said. “However, their anticipated application goes far beyond that. Blockchain will be an enabler to improve several characteristics of modern large-scale networks. My research through this grant will examine how blockchains can be used to improve secure computing towards what is often referred to as the new Web or Web3. I also look forward to programming AI-based applications using new smart contract execution frameworks in the Algorand virtual machine with improved semantics and verification.”

Xia and Seneviratne’s research will be incorporated into the curriculum at Rensselaer.

“MEGA-ACE is an amazing framework that will enable Rensselaer faculty and students to collaborate with like-minded researchers around the world to advance blockchain technology,” said Curt M. Breneman, dean of the School of Science. “Blockchain distributed ledger systems have the potential to transform the way we do business through smart contracts, decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens, as well as cryptocurrency. Rensselaer intends to be at the forefront of these developments as they change the way the world does business.”