Textbooks:
Required:
Optional:
-
"The Elements of Style", 4th Edition. William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. 1999
-
"Style: Toward Clarity and Grace". Joseph M. Williams. 1995
Workload:
The most important component of the course is a semester-long creative project on
topics broadly related to distributed transactions, consensus protocols, and distributed
ledgers (blockchain fabrics). The project must be done in groups
*
(no limit on the group size), and the role and contributions of each group member must
be clearly articulated. All projects must be approved and supervised by the
instructor. The outcome of the final project will consists of (1) designing a novel
consensus protocols, benchmarking and studying existing consensus protocols,
developing novel techniques or architectures to improve performance of a blockchain
fabric (e.g., sharding), or developing novel applications for blockchain; (2) writing
a short research paper with the ultimate goal of submitting to a top-tier conference,
of course, submission is optional and does not affect your final grade.
All project related reports must be written in LaTex using
ACM templates.
Each student is expected to present 1 (or 2 depending on the number of students taking
the course) papers throughout the semester. All presentations are done in pair, so two
students need to coordinate, study, and present the paper. Students must also submit their
presentation slides to be posted on the website. The papers will be selected from the
content tab. Students must coordinate with the TA in advance for the
paper they wish to present (we will adopt the first come, first served when assigning papers).
All paper selection must be send to the TA by September 27, if no selection is received by
the due date, a random assignment will be adopted by the TA.
Additionally, every week, each student must choose one paper among the papers that are being
presented that week and write a conference-style review. A standard template for writing a review
consists of (1) explaining the paper in your own words in one or two paragraphs;
(2) three strong points; (3) three weak points; (4) detailed concise comments that
expand upon the weak points and beyond. When writing strong and weak points please avoid
general comments such as weak motivations or poor writings and be as specific as possible. In
your detailed comments, in the end, you could include such general comments.
* With prior permission from the instructor, the projects can be
done indvidually if there is a sufficient justification.
Grading:
The final grade will be based upon the following components:
- Paper Reviews: 20%
- Paper Presentations: 20%
- Project Proposal: 10%
- Project Mid-term Progress Report: 20%
- Project Final Report: 30%
Timeline (Due Dates):
- Paper Presentation Selection: September 27, 2019
- Project Proposal (2 pages): October 11, 2019
- Project Mid-term Progress Report (4 pages): November 13, 2019
- Project Final Report (12 pages): December 13, 2019
Course Policy:
In this class, we adopt the UC Davis Code of Academic Conduct available
here.
