Friday Hacks #185, Nov 8: Proofs for scaling blockchain computation and Encoding images in Source
Posted on by Raynold Ng
Date/Time: Friday, Nov 1 at 7:00pm
Venue: Town Plaza Seminar Room 5, UTown, NUS
Succinct proofs for scaling computation on the blockchain
Talk Description:
Verifying block transactions is computationally intensive and creates a throughput bottleneck for blockchain nodes. One area of active research in blockchain scalability is verifiable computation: this is where heavy computations are outsourced to a third-party, yet can still be verified remotely by a light client with limited resources. It works by requiring third-parties to produce succinct proofs of their computations: “succinct” because they can be verified using only a fraction of the proving time. We will explore two constructions, “Rollup” and “Rollup Non-Custodial”, which use SNARKs (succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge) to verifiably outsource computation on the blockchain.
Speaker Profile
Ying Tong is a Physics graduate student at NUS. She also works as a researcher at the Centre for Quantum Technologies and the Ethereum Foundation. She’s interested in cryptography, p2p and privacy.
Reproduction of images in Source with minimal tokens
Talk Description:
The talk is about how to reproduce images in a sublanguage of JavaScript, called Source. Source is used in CS1101S, the first programming module students will take in NUS CS. Source is an extremely stripped down version of JavaScript, and it was created as a teaching aid so as to limit students only specific features of the language.
In CS1101S, there was a competition that lets student write code to generate out an image. The score of the image is decided by the number of votes as well as number of tokens used in the code. The core of the talk will be on a algorithm on how to encode and retrieve any image and display it, while using minimal tokens.
Speaker Profile
Uriel is a Year 2 Computer Science student in NUS. He is interested in algorithms/embedded systems/human-computer interaction and also does some hardware projects in his free time.
Please RSVP at our Facebook event here if you are coming so we know how many people to cater for.
See you there!