National Institute of the Republic of Serbia
ὅδε οἶκος, ὦ ἑταῖρε, μνημεῖον ἐστιν ζωῶν τῶν σοφῶν ἀνδρῶν, καὶ τῶν ἔργων αὐτῶν
BlockChain (BC) is a distributed data storage structure maintained without any third party of absolute trust. Over the last ten years, since its first implementation in cryptocurrency, BC technology has been applied to a wide range of applications in IoT, insurance, healthcare, smart contracts, finance, digital identity, voting, notary, among others. BC is a public ledger where data are added simultaneously and remain immutable. Verification of data without trusted third parties is realized by consensus protocols and provides trustworthiness of BC. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and BC are proven to be quite a powerful combination, improving virtually every industry in which they are implemented. The goal of this project is to contribute to the application of AI to the BC technology domain in two basic ways: knowledge reasoning techniques are to be used to analyze consistency of consensus algorithms for BC; AI techniques are to be employed for the analysis of anonymous data in order to evaluate robustness of privacy protection in BC. The expected results of this project are: to develop formal logic based knowledge reasoning techniques for analyzing the BC protocol; to develop knowledge reasoning techniques and formal methods for privacy management based on trustworthy BC technology; to develop new Proof-of-Work tasks based on hard optimization problems and examine their performance; to develop metaheuristic-based tools for the analysis of system security; to employ AI techniques to evaluate security of certain BC consensus protocols; to employ AI techniques to evaluate privacy evaluation of certain BC ledgers. In general, the project as a whole is meant to advance the mutual applicability AI to BC and BC to AI. The project impact is ranging from foundational to highly practical and from individual privacy protection to the society as a whole, where privacy is one of the key issues.