ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice
Special Issue on Recent Advances of Blockchain Evolution: Architecture and Performance
Guest Editors:
• Xueqin Liang, Xidian University, China, liangxueqin@xidian.edu.cn
• Xiaokang Wang, Hainan University, China, xkwang@hainanu.edu.cn
• Chonggang Wang, InterDigital Inc., USA, cgwang@ieee.org
• Witold Pedrycz, University of Alberta, Canada, wpedrycz@ualberta.ca
Blockchain, as a disruptive technology, has attracted widespread attention from both academia and industry. It is promising to establish a truly decentralized, transparent, and accountable environment, where blockchain and other cutting-edge technologies will play an essential role. Despite the benefits and great potential of blockchain, current blockchain technologies still suffer from many severe problems, e.g., insufficient trust and security, vulnerability to attacks, low efficiency, poor scalability, low throughput, high energy consumption, privacy leakage, and threats caused by dishonest behaviors. Hence, there is an urgent demand for blockchain evolution, including its architecture, consensus mechanism, incentive mechanism, as well as the theories to integrate blockchain with other emerging technologies, such as machine learning and optimization algorithms. The recent advances in artificial intelligence have offered opportunities to detect anomalies and optimize resources. Furthermore, incentive mechanisms boost the participation willingness of system entities and promote intrinsic trust for blockchain, thereby greatly enhancing system security. Obviously, the evolution of blockchain in architecture, intelligence, and incentive will further extend its applications to wider fields.
This special issue aims to bring together recent advances in new architecture, algorithms with intelligence, incentive mechanisms, and so on for innovating blockchain to improve its overall performance. It will also consider peer-reviewed journal versions (at least 30% new content) of top papers from IEEE Blockchain 2022, which is scheduled to take place in Espoo, Finland, 22-25 August 2022. The new content must be in terms of intellectual contributions, technical experiments, and findings. Any manuscript submitted to this special issue not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Contributions arising from papers given at other conferences are also welcome but should be substantially extended and should cite the conference paper where appropriate. The differences should also be explicitly outlined in the accompanying cover letter.
Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:
• New architecture of blockchain with enhanced security and privacy preservation
• AI-enabled smart blockchain
• AI-enabled blockchain consensus mechanisms
• Blockchain scalability issues and solutions
• Blockchain interoperability with privacy preservation
• Security, privacy, and trust of emerging blockchain systems
• Intelligent quality assurance of smart contracts
• Intelligent resource allocation for blockchain
• Incentive mechanisms for blockchain or blockchain-based incentive mechanisms
• AI-enabled incentive mechanisms for blockchain-based applications
• Blockchain-based novel applications and services
• Novel consensus mechanisms for redactable blockchain
• Novel redactable blockchain architecture with accountability and trustfulness
• Attacks to redactable blockchain and its solutions
• Redactable blockchain with universality
• Redactable blockchain applications in IoT, crowdsourcing, and edge computing
• Blockchain and other emerging technologies
Important Dates
• Submissions deadline: 15 December 2022
• First-round review decisions: 15 March 2023
• Deadline for revision submissions: 15 May 2023
• Notification of final decisions: 1 July 2023
• Tentative publication: December 2023, subject to journal publication schedules
Submission Information
Prospective authors are invited to submit their manuscripts electronically adhering to the ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice guidelines. Please submit your papers through the online system and be sure to select the Paper for Recent Advances of Blockchain Evolution: Architecture and Performance option for the paper-type. Also, please indicate that you are submitting to this special issue in the author's cover letter. Papers will be subject to a strict review process under the supervision of the Guest Editors, and accepted papers will be published online individually before print publication.
For questions and further information, please contact liangxueqin@xidian.edu.cn