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Tsiropoulou receives Best Paper Award at BRAINS 2020 blockchain conference

October 15, 2020 - by Kim Delker

Eirini-Eleni Tsiropoulou, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of New Mexico, was recently awarded the Best Paper Award at the 2nd Conference on Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services, BRAINS 2020, sponsored by ACM and IEEE. The paper is titled “A Truth-Inducing Sybil Resistant Decentralized Blockchain Oracle.” It was co-authored by Georgios Fragkos, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, as well as Yuxi Cai and Andreas Veneris, research collaborators from the University of Toronto, Canada.

“In this work, we proposed a novel oracle protocol based on peer prediction mechanisms with non-linear staking rules. The newly proposed paradigm is incentive-compatible even when the voter believes in a minority opinion, while simultaneously discourages Sybil attacks,” Tsiropoulou said. "The main novelty of our paper is that it introduces a mechanism to extract truthful outcomes from subjective data. The applications of this mechanism can be numerous in various fields, such as blockchain, smart cities applications, and cybersecurity.”

BRAINS conference series covers several application domains, including finance and payments (such as Facebook Libra), networks (such as power grids or telecom networks), computing, Internet of Things or service platforms. It provided a forum for discussion for researchers, engineers, and students interested in new developments in blockchain and distributed ledger technologies and their applications that could make the world of networks and services more secure, while enabling new distributed business models.

Tsiropoulou’s research is focused on cyber-physical social systems and wireless heterogeneous networks, including game theory, network economics and the Internet of Things. She founded and manages UNM’s PROTON Lab, which is focused on the field of efficient and secure resource management in interdependent systems with multiple applications in several areas, such as 5G and 6G networks, Internet of Things, public safety, mobile edge computing, and other areas.