✔️ Paper/Poster Submission Deadline: 7 Jan 2026
✔️ Acceptance Notification: 18 Mar 2026
✔️ Conference: June 1-5 2026 (Brisbane, Australia)

There’s a tool called Lavamoat that can load your deps in an isolated environment, and auto-generate a policy file to regulate per-dependency access to powerful globals. See lavamoat.github.io

Weihong will present our paper on this new protocol at IEEE #ICDCS 2025 in Glasgow next Monday.

For a high-level overview of our work, read my blog:
👉 tvcutsem.github.io/2025/07/parp...

#blockchain #web3 #research

To address this, we designed a new RPC protocol that enables interaction with permissionless blockchains in a way that remains truly depermissioned — without sacrificing data integrity or accountability, two issues that often arise when relying on anonymous public RPC endpoints.

One of our key findings is that, despite the “permissionless” nature of most major blockchain networks, access to them is often highly permissioned in practice. Due to both technical and economic constraints, access is typically funneled through centralized gatekeepers.

And obviously humans value clarity in responses ;-) Also, for code and math in particular, one can make the LLM's answers partly verifiable (run the code, check the proof, etc.)

I believe part of it is the RLHF (reinforcement learning with human feedback) - modern LLMs are not only trained to predict the next word in a dataset, they're also trained by producing multiple responses to questions and let humans rank the outputs based on their preference.

So, despite all the flaws and limitations of LLM use in general, for math/coding, I couldn't help but be reminded of Jobs's quote. What do you call a rickety bicycle that usually gets you to where you want to be, but sometimes breaks down unexpectedly? Velocipedes for the mind? :-)

And no, he's not hyping AI or making silly predictions such as "nobody will need to write code anymore". It's a nuanced opinion from somebody who saw the power of deep learning coming long before most others did.

💼 Full-time research roles, multi-year perspective, in a vibrant >100-person team. Based in Leuven at KU Leuven (top-50 globally). Interested? Check distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/jobs/jobs 🔗 Like or share to spread the word! 🙌

🧑‍🔬 Post-doc Opportunity: Seeking a researcher with expertise in Trusted Distributed Systems. Work at KU Leuven’s science campus in Leuven, Belgium! 📍 Flexible start in Q4 2025. #PostDoc #Blockchain

📚 PhD Opportunities at DistriNet:
• Secure WebAssembly-based smart contracts (Programming Languages + Security)
• Full-stack software frameworks for decentralized apps (Software Engineering + Blockchain) Top-50 university, international team! 🏛️ #PhD #Web3