[TYPES/announce] WTSC21 - workshop on trusted smart contracts @ financial crypto

[Andrea Bracciali]

[APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTING / PLEASE DISSEMINATE]
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Latest news

>>> ONLINE: FC and WTSC will be held online 

>>> Close to the LAST SUBMISSION DEADLINE

>>> Darren Tapp (Dash) invited speaker


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5th International Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts (WTSC’21) 

- https://fc21.ifca.ai/wtsc/ 


March 5, 2021
 - Online -

In Association with Financial Cryptography 

- https://fc21.ifca.ai/

—————————————————————————————————————— 

CALL FOR PAPERS 


Smart contracts, an highly transformational technology, are 
self-enforcing agreements in the form of executable programs 
that are deployed to and run on top of blockchains. 


Several proposals have developed the idea of algorithmic validation 
of decentralised trust, along Szabo's intuition. The first significant 
example was the Ethereum blockchain. A myriad of possible further 
directions have been proposed, many of them are in active development. 


These technologies introduce a novel programming framework and 
execution environment, which are not satisfactorily understood at the 
moment. Multidisciplinary and multifactorial aspects affect correctness, 
safety, privacy, authentication, efficiency, sustainability, resilience and 
trust in smart contracts. 


Existing frameworks, which are competing for their market share, 
adopt different solutions to issues like the above ones. Merits of 
proposed solutions are still to be fully evaluated and compared by 
means of systematic scientific investigation, and further research is 
needed towards laying the foundations of Trusted Smart Contracts. 


A non-exhaustive list of topics of interest, open problems and future 
directions includes: 


- validation and definition of the programming abstractions and execution model, 

- verification of the properties expected to be enforced by smart contracts, 

- incentives, governance, participatory models, and implications on smart contracts, 

- resilience of the consensus/validation/mining/execution model, 

- fairness and decentralisation of contracts and their management, 

- rewards, economics and sustainability/stability of the framework, 

- on- and off-chain interaction  modalities, protocols and context, 

- (smart-contract supported) multi-chain interoperability

- (smart-contract supported) decentralised exchanges 

- sharding, concurrency, and parallelism in smart contracts, 

- effects of consensus mechanisms and proof-of mechanisms on smart contracts, 

- game-theoretic approaches for security and validation, 

- digital and ring signatures 

- multiparty computation and homomorphic encryption for the privacy of smart contract execution 

- privacy and privacy-preserving contracts, 

- authentication and anonymity management, 

- oblivious transfer, 

- data provenance, 

- access rights, 

- foundations of software engineering for smart contracts, 

- blockchain data analysis, 

- comparison of the permissioned and non-permissioned scenarios, 

- use cases and killer applications of smart contracts, 

- regulation and law enforcement, 

- future outlook on smart contract technologies, 

WTSC focuses on smart contracts as an application layer on top of blockchains, 
however aspects of the underlying supporting blockchains clearly become 
relevant in so much as they affect properties of the smart contracts, and are 
of great interest for WTSC. 

WTSC aims to gather together researchers from both academia and industry 
interested in the many facets of Trusted Smart Contract engineering, and to 
provide a multi-disciplinary forum for discussing open problems, proposed 
solutions and the vision on future developments. 

Associated to Financial Cryptography, a recognised premiere conference for the 
blockchain world, WTSC aims to become a reference venue for the discussion 
of cutting-edge smart contracts and associated blockchain technologies. 


Experts in fields including (but not limited to): 


- programming languages, 

- verification, 

- security, 

- software engineering, 

- decision and game theory, 

- cryptography, 

- finance and economics, 

- monetary systems, 

- finance and economics, 

- regulation and law, 

as well as, practitioners and companies interested in blockchain technologies, 
are invited to submit their findings, case studies and reports on open problems 
for presentation at the workshop, to take part in this third edition of WTSC and 
make it a lively forum. 




INVITED SPEAKERS (TBC) 


Continuing on WTSC tradition (slides on the web)

— Buterin (Ethereum) 2017, 
- Breitman (Tezos) and Mishra (NYU) 2018, 
— Artamonov (Splix - Ethereum Classic) and Ian Grigg (www.iang.org) 2019,  
— Gutmann (University of Auckland, with Workshop on Coordination of Decentralized Finance) 2020,

we are defining the 2021 list, including:

— Darren Tapp (Arizona State University)
- TBC



IMPORTANT DATES 


WTSC adopts for the second year a submission schedule ** with double deadline **. 
A first deadline will allow authors to plan their participation well in advance. 
A second deadline will allow authors who need extra time to develop their contributions, 
to have a further opportunity to participate. Selected borderline papers from the first 
deadline will be considered for and also allowed to resubmit to the second deadline. 

Abstract registration is kindly requested in advance. 

Abstract Registration:		16 December 2020 
Paper Submission Deadline: 	23 December  
Early Author Notification: 	12 January  2021 

>>> Late Submission Deadline: 	5 February  <<<

Late Author Notification: 	21 February 

Early registration deadline: 	TBA 
Final Papers:			TBA 

WTSC: 				5 March 2021 

Financial Cryptography: 	1-5 March 2021

Final Papers 			TBA 
(Springer post-proceeding) 



SUBMISSION 


WTSC solicits submissions of manuscripts that represent significant and novel research 
contributions. Submissions must not substantially overlap with works that have been 
published or that are simultaneously submitted to a journal or a conference with proceedings. 

Submissions should follow the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science format and 
should be no more than 15 pages including references and appendices. Papers may also 
be in a short format, no more than 8 pages including references and appendices. 

In-progress work and developing ideas can be submitted as a poster. 

Also "Systemisation of Knowledge" papers will be accepted and have a page limit of 20 pages 
but *excluding* references. These should be marked "SoK: … ”. 

Accepted papers will appear in the proceedings published by Springer Lecture Notes in 
Computer Science. Authors who seek to submit their works to journals may opt-out by 
publishing an extended abstract only. 


All submissions will be reviewed double-blind, and as such, must be anonymous, with no 
author names, affiliations, acknowledgements, or obvious references. 



SUBMISSION PAGE 

Contributions can be submitted at this link: 

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wtsc2021




PROGRAM CHAIRS 

Andrea Bracciali                  University of Stirling, UK 

Massimiliano Sala                 University of Trento, IT 



PROGRAM COMMITTEE (TBC)


Monika di Angelo 	Vienna University of Technology, AT
Igor Artamonov 		Ethereum Classic Dev, UK
Daniel Augot 		INRIA, FR
Surya Bakshi 		University of Illinois, USA
Fadi Barbara 		University of Turin, IT
Massimo Bartoletti 	University of Cagliari, IT
Devraj Basu 		Strathclyde University, UK
Stefano Bistarelli 	University of Perugia, IT
Christina Boura 	Versailles SQT Univ., FR
Andrea Bracciali 	University of Stirling, UK
Daniel Broby 		Strathclyde University, UK
James Chapman 		IOHK, UK
Martin Chapman 		King’s College London, UK
Nicola Dimitri 		University of Siena, IT
Nadia Fabrizio 		Cefriel, IT
Murdoch Gabbay 		Heriot-Watt University, UK
Oliver Giudice 		Banca d'Italia, IT
Davide Grossi 		University of Groningen, NL
Yoichi Hirai 		BedRock Systems, Inc. US
Lars R. Knudsen 	Technical University of Denmark, DK
Ioannis Kounelis 	Joint Research Centre, European Commission, IT
Pascal Lafourcade 	University Clermont Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, FR
Andrew Lewis-Pye 	London School of Economics, UK
Carsten Maple 		Warwick University, UK
Michele Marchesi 	University of Cagliari, IT
Fabio Martinelli 	IIT-CNR, IT
Akaki Mamageishvili 	ETHZ, CH
Luca Mazzola 		Lucerne University, CH
Sihem Mesnager 		University of Paris VIII, FR
Philippe Meyer 		Avaloq, CH
Bud Mishra 		NYU, USA
Carlos Molina-Jimenez 	University of Cambridge, UK
Massimo Morini 		Algorand Foundation, SP
Immaculate Motsi-Omoijiade 	University of Warwick, UK
Alex Norta 		Tallin University of Technology, EE
Akira Otsuka 		Institute of Information Security, JP
Federico Pintore 	University of Oxford, UK
Massimiliano Sala 	University of Trento, IT
Darren Tapp 		Arizona State University, US
Jason Teutsch 		Truebit, USA
Roberto Tonelli 	University of Cagliari, IT
Philip Wadler 		University of Edinburgh, UK
Yilei Wang 		Hong Kong Polytechnic University, HK
Tim Weingärtner 	Lucerne University, CH
Ales Zamuda 		University of Maribor, SLO
Santiago Zanella-Beguelin 	Microsoft, UK
Dionysis Zindros 	University of Athens, GR