Titile: Reliably Putting Their Heads Together: Application of Probabilistic Blockchain in Multi-Agent Decision-Making Systems
Date: 2024/05/17 15:40-17:00
Location: CSIE R103
Speaker: Prof. Chin-Tser Huang,University of South Carolina
Host: Prof. Cheng-Fu Chou
Abstract:
Designed as a distributed data storage system, blockchain employs a consensus mechanism to validate the addition of new data blocks while saving the need for mediation by a centralized server. However, when the blockchain technology is applied in decision-making applications, the consensus mechanism requires the decision to be deterministic, which will ignore different recommendations made by multiple agents and may put the computing system at the risk of missing valid insights. In this talk, we will first introduce the concept of probabilistic blockchain and compare the strengths and weaknesses of some existing approaches. Then, we introduce our solution called SMARPchain, which is a paradigm of reputational probabilistic blockchain based on the incorporation of smart markers. The distinguishing characteristic of SMARPchain is that it enables multiway branching which allows the result produced by each agent to be kept on the blockchain as a branchchain. Moreover, SMARPchain computes a probabilistic score on each branchchain based on the associated agent’s reputation to help the decision maker reach an informed decision. Our evaluation results show that SMARPchain will enhance the security and robustness of multi-agent decision-making systems with acceptable overhead.
Biography:
Dr. Chin-Tser Huang is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of South Carolina at Columbia. He received the B.S. degree in Computer Science and Information Engineering from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, in 1993, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Sciences from The University of Texas at Austin in 1998 and 2003, respectively. His research interests include network security, network protocol design and verification, and distributed systems. He is the director of the Secure Protocol Implementation and Development (SPID) Laboratory at the University of South Carolina. He is the author (along with Mohamed Gouda) of the book “Hop Integrity in the Internet,” published by Springer in 2005. His research has been funded by DARPA, AFOSR, AFRL, NSF, NEH, and USDOT. He is an NRC Research Associate in 2020, and a recipient of the USAF Summer Faculty Fellowship Award and of the AFRL Visiting Faculty Research Program Award in 2008-2023. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM.