The topic of this year’s seminar is “Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain.” The blockchain has emerged as a novel distributed consensus scheme that allows transactions, and any other data, to be securely stored and verified without a centralized authority. For some time, the notion of blockchain was tightly coupled with Bitcoin, a well-known proof of work hash-based mechanism. Today, there are more than one thousand alternate blockchains. Some are simple variants of Bitcoin, whereas others significantly differ in their design and provide different functional and security guarantees. This shows that the research and industrial communities are in search of a simple, scalable, and deployable blockchain technology. Various reports further point to an increased interest in the use of blockchains across many applications and a significant investment by different industries in their development. The blockchain will likely induce considerable change to many systems and businesses. Distributed trust, and therefore security and privacy, is at the core of the blockchain technologies and has the potential to either make them a success or cause them to fail.

In this research driven seminar, you will have the opportunity to explore this exciting research and development area and gain cutting-edge skills for your future career development. To get a further feel about the importance of the topic covered in this seminar please see an overview of the blockchain technology’ potential impact in AI (https://101blockchains.com/blockchain-and-ai/).

This seminar will help you:

· Obtain in depth knowledge and skills in the seminar topic area

· Learn and practice research and development skills

· Improve the ability to identify original research challenges

· Improve your scientific thinking

· Learn how to conduct the studies in the information systems

· Learn how to perform literature survey in the information systems

· Improve the ability to communicate research results

Standard FS (=”Forschungsseminar”) attendance policy applies. Attendance in the first unit and overall for 80% of the time is required. Attendance in the first unit is mandatory (unqualified absence will result in deregistration from the course). For more information on the WU FS attendance policy please refer to https://www.wu.ac.at/studierende/mein-studium/bachelorguide/lv-und-pruefungsinfos/forschungsseminar-fs
See below for mandatory attendance policy in the first unit.

This is a research-driven seminar that will consist of a series of meetings that will be a combination of research discussions, project discussions, and coaching. The projects will fall in three broad categories (based on the Professor approval): a) replication study with incremental improvement, b) original research, and c) open-source software contributions (special permission needed after programming skills examination).

There will be 4 evaluations (for projects (a) and (b); for project (c) it will be custom tailored):

1. Project idea, abstract, and introduction (as a proposal) (week 4; 10 marks; minimum 3 references)

2. Project background/related work, research method, and preliminary results (week 7; 20 marks; minimum 20 references)

3. Project final report (week 11; 50 marks; minimum 30 references)

4. Oral exam on the project report content (during last 3 weeks; 10-15 minutes; 20 marks)

Grading Scale:

• 5: unsatisfactory: ≤ 50 %
• 4: sufficient: > 50 % to ≤ 62.5 %
• 3: satisfactory: > 62.5 % to ≤ 75 %
• 2: good: > 75 % to ≤ 87.5 %
• 1: excellent: > 87.5 %

Core work instructions:

· Each group will consist of one member unless otherwise agreed up and approved by the course instructor.

· The strict deadline for the project report is the end of week 11. No work will be accepted after the deadline under any circumstances. As such, it is strongly recommended that you submit your work at least 24 hours in advance in order to avoid any last minute problems such as no network access, printers not working, etc.

· Minimum required length of the report is 15 pages for team of one member IEEE Transactions Latex template (this is around 30-40 pages Word double space)

· For final report, you must use the IEEE Latex Template (https://goo.gl/6f2aar). Documents formatted in anything but Latex and following any other template will not be accepted. See the sample documents for the exact rules. Please use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} (without option 'compsoc' or 'compsocconf'). All formatting, including tables, must be in Latex. Students like to use online editing tool https://www.overleaf.com/.

· You must submit electronic version of your report (Latex sources and PDF output) and a hard copy of your report.

· No academic dishonesty will be tolerated. Please refer back to MIT Academic Integrity Handbook (http://integrity.mit.edu/ ). Note the rules about paraphrasing.

· The report must be written in formal academic English. Please make sure that there are no syntax and grammatical errors.

Successful completion of course 1 (“Basics of ICT” / “Grundzüge der IKT”) of the SBWL Business Information Systems.
It is strongly recommended to also have completed course 2 to 4 of the SBWL before commencing with this course.
If you hold a valid registration for the course but are unable to participate, please deregister during the open registration period in LPIS. Your spot can be granted to other fellow students.
Spots are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis during the registration period.
After completion of the registration period, available spots will be allocated to students on the waiting list who have no valid registration for the relevant curricula's point. Students will be ranked by their study progress as determined by the vice rectorat for teaching ("hardship principle"), not by their rank on the waiting list.
Important Note: The participation in the first unit is mandatory; students who fail to come forfeit their place to students on the waiting list (in the  sequence of the waiting list). Students can excuse themselves if the reason for missing the first unit is serious and will concern only the first unit.

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sajjad.khan@wu.ac.at