Introduction to stochastic programming

In recent years, the rapid development of cryptocurrencies and their underlying blockchain technology has revived Szabo’s original idea of smart contracts, i.e., computer protocols that are designed to automatically facilitate, verify, and enforce the negotiation and implementation of digital contracts without central authorities. Smart contracts can find a wide spectrum of potential application scenarios in the digital economy and intelligent industries, including financial services, management, healthcare, and Internet of Things, among others, and also have been integrated into the mainstream blockchain-based development platforms, such as Ethereum and Hyperledger. However, smart contracts are still far from mature, and major technical challenges such as security and privacy issues are still awaiting further research efforts. For instance, the most notorious case might be “The DAO Attack” in June 2016, which led to more than $50 million Ether transferred into an adversary’s account. In this paper, we strive to present a systematic and comprehensive overview of blockchain-enabled smart contracts, aiming at stimulating further research toward this emerging research area. We first introduced the operating mechanism and mainstream platforms of blockchain-enabled smart contracts, and proposed a research framework for smart contracts based on a novel six-layer architecture. Second, both the technical and legal challenges, as well as the recent research progresses, are listed. Third, we presented several typical application scenarios. Toward the end, we discussed the future development trends of smart contracts. This paper is aimed at providing helpful guidance and reference for future research efforts.

Blockchain-Enabled Smart Contracts: Architecture, Applications, and Future Trends

Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain have become two of the most trending and disruptive technologies. Blockchain technology has the ability to automate payment in cryptocurrency and to provide access to a shared ledger of data, transactions, and logs in a decentralized, secure, and trusted manner. Also with smart contracts, blockchain has the ability to govern interactions among participants with no intermediary or a trusted third party. AI, on the other hand, offers intelligence and decision-making capabilities for machines similar to humans. In this paper, we present a detailed survey on blockchain applications for AI. We review the literature, tabulate, and summarize the emerging blockchain applications, platforms, and protocols specifically targeting AI area. We also identify and discuss open research challenges of utilizing blockchain technologies for AI.

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Blockchain for AI: Review and Open Research Challenges

An overview on smart contracts : Challenges, advances and platforms

As an emerging decentralized architecture and distributed computing paradigm underlying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, blockchain has attracted intensive attention in both research and applications in recent years. The key advantage of this technology lies in the fact that it enables the establishment of secured, trusted, and decentralized autonomous ecosystems for various scenarios, especially for better usage of the legacy devices, infrastructure, and resources. In this paper, we presented a systematic investigation of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Related fundamental rationales, technical advantages, existing and potential ecosystems of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are discussed, and a six-layer reference model of the blockchain framework is proposed with detailed description for each of its six layers. Potential applications of blockchain and cryptocurrencies are also addressed. Our aim here is to provide guidance and reference for future research along this promising and important direction.

Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies: Model, Techniques, and Applications

With the rapid development of cryptocurrency and its underlying blockchain technologies, platforms such as Ethereum and Hyperledger began to support various types of smart contracts. Smart contracts are computer protocols intended to digitally facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract. Smart contracts have broad range of applications, such as financial services, prediction markets and Internet of Things (IoT), etc. However, there are still many challenges such as security issues and privacy disclosure that await future research. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview on blockchain powered smart contracts. First, we give a systematic introduction for smart contracts, including the basic framework, operating mechanisms, platforms and programming languages. Second, application scenarios and existing challenges are discussed. Finally, we describe the recent advances of smart contract and present its future development trends, e.g., parallel blockchain. This paper is aimed at providing helpful guidance and reference for future research efforts.

An Overview of Smart Contract: Architecture, Applications, and Future Trends

Real-time bidding (RTB) is an emerging and promising business model for online computational advertising in the age of big data. Based on analysis of massive amounts of Cookie data generated by Internet users, RTB advertising has the potential of identifying in real-time the characteristic and interest of the target audience in each ad impression, automatically delivering best-matched ads, and optimizing their prices via auction-based programmatic buying scheme. RTB has significantly changed online advertising, evolving from the traditional pattern of "media buying" and "ad-slot buying" to "targetaudience buying", and is expected to be the standard business model for online advertising in the future. In this paper, we discussed the current market practice of RTB advertising, presented the key roles and typical business processes in RTB markets, and summarized the current research progresses in the existing literature. The aim of this paper is to provide useful reference and guidance for future works.

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A survey on real time bidding advertising

Welcome to the first issue of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS) of 2022. We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere thanks to our associate editors, reviewers, authors, and readers for your great support and effort devoted to IEEE TCSS. Happy New Year to you all, and cheers to health, happiness, and high-producing in 2022! 

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MetaSocieties in Metaverse: MetaEconomics and MetaManagement for MetaEnterprises and MetaCities

Since the increasing popularization of the emerging blockchain technology, blockchain mining has attracted more and more attention. Due to the difficulty of solo mining, typically miners choose to join a mining pool. As there are many mining pools and different mining pools may adopt different reward mechanisms, how to choose the appropriate mining pool has become one of the most important issues faced by miners, since miners can get different rewards in different pools. In practice, there are three commonly used reward mechanisms for the mining pools to distribute the reward among their miners, namely, the proportional mechanism, the pay-per-share mechanism, and the pay-per-last- $N$ -share mechanism. In this paper, we study the pool selection problem faced by the miners, and model it as a risk decision problem since different reward mechanisms have different risks. We establish a pool selection model based on the maximum-likelihood criterion and also study the effect of $N$ on the miners’ optimal pool selection decisions. By utilizing the computational experiments approach, we validate our proposed pool selection strategies. Our results can provide important managerial insights for miners when making their pool selection decisions.

Research on the Selection Strategies of Blockchain Mining Pools

Budget optimization is one of the primary decision-making issues faced by advertisers in search auctions A quality budget optimization strategy can significantly improve the effectiveness of search advertising campaigns, thus helping advertisers to succeed in the fierce competition of online marketing This paper investigates budget optimization problems in search advertisements and proposes a novel hierarchical budget optimization framework (BOF), with consideration of the entire life cycle of advertising campaigns Then, we formulated our BOF framework, made some mathematical analysis on some desirable properties, and presented an effective solution algorithm Moreover, we established a simple but illustrative instantiation of our BOF framework which can help advertisers to allocate and adjust the budget of search advertising campaigns Our BOF framework provides an open testbed environment for various strategies of budget allocation and adjustment across search advertising markets With field reports and logs from real-world search advertising campaigns, we designed some experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our BOF framework and instantiated strategies Experimental results are quite promising, where our BOF framework and instantiated strategies perform better than two baseline budget strategies commonly used in practical advertising campaigns

Rui Qin

Papers

An Overview of Smart Contract: Architecture, Applications, and Future Trends

A survey on real time bidding advertising

MetaSocieties in Metaverse: MetaEconomics and MetaManagement for MetaEnterprises and MetaCities

Research on the Selection Strategies of Blockchain Mining Pools

A Budget Optimization Framework for Search Advertisements Across Markets