UCLA Ventures

Lecturing and serving as a TA for CS 188, the first blockchain course within UCLA's School of Engineering.(Spring 2020 & 2021)CS 188: Distributed Algorithms and Blockchains. Study intermingles old distributed (permissioned) systems and new distributed (permissionless) systems. Permissioned portion introduces models of distributed computing and tasks, from wait-free commit-adopt to synchronous Byzantine agreement; and discusses practical implementations of eventual synchronous… Lecturing and serving as a TA for CS 188, the first blockchain course within UCLA's School of Engineering.(Spring 2020 & 2021)CS 188: Distributed Algorithms and Blockchains. Study intermingles old distributed (permissioned) systems and new distributed (permissionless) systems. Permissioned portion introduces models of distributed computing and tasks, from wait-free commit-adopt to synchronous Byzantine agreement; and discusses practical implementations of eventual synchronous consensus, such as Paxos and variants of pBFT algorithms. Permissionless portion reviews elementary cryptographic primitives such as public key infrastructure (PKI), digital signatures, hash functions, Merkle trees, and zk-SNARKs. Introduction to permissionless consensus through proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, and probabilistic avalanching. Review of various systems such as Bitcoin, Etherum, Libra, and Algorand. Taught under Professor Eli Gafni.(Winter 2019)ECE 188: Blockchain Programming. The 4-unit course features topics including hash functions, public key cryptography, digital signatures, proof of work, proof of stake, distributed computing, stablecoins, the Solidity programming language, Ethereum, decentralized applications (dApps), smart contracts, and tokens, taught under the supervision of professor John Villasenor.Press coverage links:https://dailybruin.com/2018/12/12/blockchain-at-ucla-provides-information-to-students-leads-to-course-on-topic/https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ucla-launches-first-accredited-blockchain-020524034.html