Tsinghua-Cornell Winter School on Blockchain was opened by Prof. Andrew Yao, Dean of IIIS, Tsinghua University in Shenzhen on December 8, 2017, and attracted nearly one hundred people from the academics and industries, including Tsinghua, Cornell, UC Berkeley, MIT, Northeast University, Ethereum, Huawei, Ant Financial and PBOC.

During the winter school, speakers turned to cutting-edge science to investigate blockchain technologies and how the Blockchain consensus engine differed from the classical methods for Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) from a distributed computing perspective. “The technique of blockchain is a new field, but will be a crucial component for the future cryptocurrency exchange service.” said Wei Xu, Assistant Professor from IIIS.

The five-day program also included a research workshop on the last two days and was concluded with lightning talks by Tsinghua students from Prof. Wei Xu’s group. The workshop shed light on the combination of government, industry, university and research in this field and was an opportunity for people to add to the best knowledge of blockchain.

This year’s winter school was co-organized by IIIS, Tsinghua University and Cornell University.

(By Yuying Chang, Photo by Xiang Li)