PhD Course - International Blockchain School - Winter Edition

January 24 – January 28

• Prof. Dr. Roman Beck (ITU)

Lecturers: 

• Roman Beck (ITU)
• Peter Sestoft (ITU)
• Michel Avital (CBS)
• Alexandra Andhov (KU)
• Fritz Henglein (KU)
• Boris Düdder (KU)
• Stefan Voigt (KU)
• Qin Xin (University of the Faroe Islands)

Dates of the course: 

• January 24th – January 28th, 2022

Location:

• IT-university in Copenhagen: Scroll Bar, Auditorium 0, Auditorium 4

Course description:

In 2017, the Peoples Bank of China stated that “the future of money is crypto”, and we aim to shed light on that future in our Blockchain Winter School together in this cross-disciplinary event. Increasingly, startups in the Fintech, TechFin and DeFi sector focus on DLT-based innovations to provide new financial services to private or corporate clients. Those innovations primarily promise better and more affordable solutions while guaranteeing transparency, high execution quality, and auditability. New payment services for international money transfer, better access to capital markets for SMEs, programmable solutions to settle transactions autonomously, intelligent wallets that act on behave of their owners, decentralized exchanges that allow nearly instant trading, new types of on- ledger data analytics, smarter integration of seamless taxation, new shared ownership models of digital or digitized assets, quantum computing secure DeFi solutions are just some examples where DLT systems in combination with a tokenization of the economy are not just changing existing financial business models, but the financial market itself. The aim of this Winter School is to develop innovative ideas on Sustainable Decentralized Finance. Sustainable DeFi does not only generate better and more sophisticated financial services in networked business models, but is doing so in an eco-friendly, and durable way. The longevity of distributed business models is dependent on ecologic and ecology sustainability. Together with our partnering organizations, we will develop use cases and challenges that will be the base for the hackathon and makeathons, where students in close cooperation with the case-giving organizations will create suggestions for sustainable decentralized finance solutions.

For this edition of the Blockchain School, we will establish three different tracks for the case work:

1. Explorer Track: In this track, technical issues in existing Blockchain / DLT systems are discussed and potential solutions are developed. This is a makeathon, where not necessarily code is written, but where potential solutions are developed conceptually.
2. Exploiter Track: In this track, we will offer the opportunity for students with prior experience around blockchain prototyping to work with organisations which have already prototypes developed. The intention is to further improve demonstrators, or design them anew, to meet the more advanced requirements and level of know-how among participating students as well as organisations.
3. Tech Track: students will work together with case organisations from industry and public sector on developing blockchain prototypes in a 24 hours hackathon.

All students will be encouraged to further improve their work in form of academic papers. We will work on special issues and fast track options in leading journals to allow teams who would like to publish their results in academic outlets can submit their work.

Preparation and Literature:

Programme:

Prerequisites:

Students interested in taking part in the Winter School must be enrolled as PhD or master students in a computer science, information systems, engineering or other cognate programs at an university. At least introductory programming experience is a requirement in track 1. Advanced experience is needed in track 2, while in track 3 a degree and research in computer science and blockchain is required.

Student applicants must submit a one page CV as well as a one page motivation letter describing what their blockchain interest consists of within a single PDF file in their application.

As part of the admission process, the organizers will assess the quality of the submitted application material before finally choosing the participants. Admitted Winter School participants must make themselves familiar with the teaching material made available to them before the Winter School starts.

Admitted students enrolled at a Danish university are free of charge. The course fee for international PhD students is 2,500 DKK, which will be invoiced after the admission and need to be paid until January 14th.

Exam:

Participants will present their blockchain solutions at the end of the Winter School and defend these. In addition, they will produce 15 pages of report after the Winter School and/or write a paper that is to be submitted to an academic outlet, such as conference or journal, coached by the PhD Winter School organisers. The presentation, report as well as the working paper are mandatory deliverables and after they have been assessed at a satisfactory level, the ECTS points will be granted, and a certificate issued.

Credits: 

The course is eligible for 6 ECTS.

Amount of hours the student is expected to use on the course:

Participation: 56 hours (4 days 8 hour each and 24h hackathon on Thursday/Friday)
Preparation: 36 hours (proposal writing, self-study and preparation of mandatory material)
Post-processing: 60 hours (finalizing the 15 pages report on the developed blockchain solution and writing a paper)

Participants: 

We expect 50 to 80 PhD students from national and international universities.

How to sign up:

Interested participants can sign up here: https://blockchainschool.eu/how-to-apply/.

Required information are first name, last name, e-mail address, mailing address, university, and background