Every year, MaxData acknowledges the best student of each of the Department of Informatics’ courses. The award is presented at the Ciências ULisboa anniversary ceremony.

Once again, LASIGE students were distinguished for their academic record (MSc) and research work (PhD) on the 2021/2022 period.

Robin Vassantlal’s work earned the researcher a MaxData Informatic Excellence award for a PhD student. His research concerns the limitations of blockchain in the open setting with an unknown number of nodes, which includes (1) low performance and (2) not providing all the required features needed to store confidential data. The PhD student aims to address these problems using a mostly uncharted Consensus with Unknown Participants distributed system model and a secret sharing mechanism.

His research has already resulted in the paper “COBRA: Dynamic Proactive Secret Sharing for Confidential BFT Services“, presented at the 43rd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP’22), a top-ranked conference.