[Ar-Curunir]

The research is from Dawn Song's lab, and she's a established research that has founded entire subfields of computer security.

The blockchain space is often full of scams, but you can usually trust stuff backed by academic papers from established folks.

[jesseb]

I have no stake in this whatsoever, I just have some questions that maybe you (or somebody else) can answer, as I'm finding myself agreeing with the parent post.

- What does blockchain have to do with HPC? What advantages does this give me versus current solutions?

- If I was concerned of the privacy of my data, why would I put it on an unproven, public, immutable ledger? We all know what can happen when even minor bugs rear their heads in these types of applications.

- Where does machine learning come into the equation?

- Why would I want to use this rather than AWS/GCE/etc.?

I guess really what I'm asking is, what problem is this solving? Just curious :)

[Ar-Curunir]

The problem is combining multiple people's data for use in ML, and also establishing provenance of different data sets; existing solutions would reveal privacy completely in these use cases.

[justicezyx]

> has founded entire subfields of computer security.

Mind to provide a pointer? Generally new to Dawn's work, and I think many readers here have a similar background.

[Karrot_Kream]

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/

That took maybe 3 seconds to search. The amount of skepticism here is absurd.

[justicezyx]

Sorry, I might not be specific enough, I am looking for pointers that show that the person created a new research area, as suggested in the previous comment.

If you list pub list, then I have no idea how to find proof of the fact.

Edit: Below are a bit ranty comments on research style. Please ignore it and provide pointers that show the person created a new research area.

And frankly, the changing of the research areas (security -> deep learning -> blockchain) are a typical symbol of smart people who are good at catching trendy research topics, but never achieved the true top-tier research results. To be specific, such people are absolutely smart and intelligent, but they have a pattern to always latch on so-called cutting-edge topics, and quickly gain high reputation. In the end, their fame and what they do usually does not well match each other.

[tCfD]

It does help that when you are one of the first to latch on to a trending research area, there is relatively little in the way of competition for attention, funding and publishing priority. Also, in such scenarios domain specific standards and expectations have yet to be set and thus are not something that your research will be held to, at least not until the field begins to mature. In fact your research may form the basis for some of those conventions. This does not necessarily mean that the research was particularly noteworthy, thorough, or inherently outstanding.

[Ar-Curunir]

Lol Dawn published the very first paper on searchable encryption. She and her students have also pioneered a number of new techniques in software security, new techniques in adversarial machine learning, new techniques in teaching NNs how to "program", etc.

[justicezyx]

Mind to point to the paper titles?

Btw, I didn't mean to discredit but merely to get the data.

[marenkay]

This is what you want: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/se.pdf

[VMG]

> but you can usually trust stuff backed by academic papers from established folks

nope