A Scalable Blockchain Approach for Trusted Computation and Verifiable Simulation in Multi-Party Collaborations

Ravi Kiran Raman, Roman Vaculín, Michael Hind, Sekou L. Remy, Eleftheria Kyriaki Pissadaki, Nelson Kibichii Bore, Roozbeh Daneshvar, Biplav Srivastava, Kush R. Varshney

Abstract: In high-stakes multi-party policy making based on machine learning and simulation models involving independent computing agents, a notion of trust in results is critical in facilitating transparency, accountability, and collaboration. Using a novel combination of distributed validation of atomic computation blocks and a blockchain-based immutable audit mechanism, this work proposes a framework for distributed trust in computations. In particular we address the scalability problem by reducing the storage and communication costs using a lossy compression scheme. This framework guarantees not only verifiability of final results, but also the validity of local computations, and its cost-benefit tradeoffs are studied using a synthetic example of training a neural network.