Research Assistant

Full-time: 35 hours per week

Fixed-term: 12 months

The opportunity:

The School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh invites applications for a Research Assistant (RA) to conceptualize and design an index that quantifies the decentralization of blockchain systems. The student would work with a highly collaborative, interdisciplinary team on the Edinburgh Decentralization Index (EDI) project within the Blockchain Technology Laboratory (BLT), supervised by Dr Daniel Woods and Prof Aggelos Kiayias. The RA’s interest and experience in measuring properties of complex systems is more important than knowledge of blockchain systems.

Project description:

“Decentralization” is widely claimed to be a property of blockchain platforms. However, closer inspection reveals surprising concentrations of power across various layers of each platform. Taking Bitcoin as an example, just four mining pools control enough hash power to mount a 51% attack. More subtle aspects are the small number of developers who contribute to the Bitcoin software and operators of the Internet infrastructure over which the Bitcoin protocol is used to communicate. Similar concentrations of power exist on other blockchain platforms.

This motivates a structured approach to quantifying the decentralization of blockchain systems. The EDI project aims to develop a principled, modular, and reproducible set of metrics allowing stakeholders including investors and regulators to compare how decentralized blockchain systems are along a few layers (e.g., hardware, software, consensus, geography and so on). This scientific work will inform and underpin the design of a real-world platform, built by an engineering team within the EDI project.

The Position:

The collaborative nature of the EDI project is unique. The project will employ senior researchers and developers to work on engineering challenges (e.g., data collection). The student’s main contribution will be in developing metrics for each sub-strata of the blockchain platform (software, hardware, consensus, p2p networking, governance) and developing a principled approach to aggregating these metrics into a single index of decentralization.

The ideal candidate would have expertise and experience in running servers (sysadmin), performing data collection of network services and applications in a black box manner (e.g., using tools such as wireshark), scraping data from web, social media and other sources, archiving extracted data in databases for efficient access, managing large databases, as well as designing and writing tools that automate all such procedures. A deep understanding of blockchain systems on a design level as well as knowledge of data visualization and UI tools is desirable but not necessary. The candidate should also have experience of and be open to collaborative work.

This post is full-time (35 hours per week); The salary for this post is £33,882 to £39,105 per annum.

Your skills and attributes for success:

Essential

• A good bachelor's Hons degree (2.1 or above or international equivalent) and/or MSc in a relevant subject (e.g., computer science, information systems, etc.)
• Sysadmin experience.
• Network, web and social media data collection and archiving experience.
• Basic database management experience.
• Openness to collaborative work as part of a broader project.

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