Overview Of The Interact Ii Program: Fill & Download for Free

I currently work as a Technical Program Manager(TPM) intern at Facebook and I will give a brief overview of the role. As the name of the role implies, there is technical component and program management component.Technical component: There are several teams in Facebook that are managed by TPMs. Depending on which domain/team you are in, you will master the technical aspects of the project. For example, I am in backbone engineering domain and I had a steep learning curve with respect to various data center & backbone technologies during the first few weeks. At the end, you will have a complete picture of how various pieces work together at scale and this is immensely helpful when you develop the project plan.Program management component: Now, you can divide this into three key buckets (1) Planning (2) Execution (3) Conflict/Issue resolution(1) Planning: After having a background about the project, you will develop a project plan. You will be exposed to various internal project management tools and external tools such as MS-Project through which you can develop your project plan. To refine the plan, more specifically, to make sure you have covered all the tasks to be done, you will be required to interact through 1:1s with diverse internal teams and external vendors. This is a great experience as you get to view the project through multiple perspectives. Then, you would schedule the tasks to make sure tasks that can be done in parallel are executed simultaneously.(2) Execution: The key tasks here are (i) Assign the tasks to owners (ii) Resolve dependencies - make sure the engineer has what it takes to complete the task (iii), Monitor/Track - Periodically sync up with team members through weekly meeting/messenger and make sure things are on track (iv) Communicate to extended teams/upper management about the progress of the project through summary reports(3) Conflict/Issue resolution: During the course of the project, you might encounter issues, conflicts, delays etc.. Your role would be to record the issue, identify solutions and propose and get the buy-in from the team to resolve the issue. You will also be required to assess risks beforehand so that you are prepared and can make maximum progress in a given time.

A2AHere are the highlights:IIT KHARAGPUR-QEDMOverviewThe 5-year dual degree curriculum in Quality Engineering Design and Manufacturing (QEDM) is offered in two verticals in Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Electronics. For each of the vertical, there will be B Tech (Hons) in Engineering Product Design and Manufacturing and M Tech in Design and Quality Engineering.The Dual Degree Program is a unique program conceived at IIT Kharagpur to inculcate in students an enhanced awareness of Engineering Design, Manufacturing and Quality issues related either to Mechanical Engineering Products such Automotive Systems or to Electronic Products such as Real-time Embedded Systems. The academic content of the program is accordingly designed to expose the students to most major engineering aspects related to such products including Product Modelling and Development, Design for Quality, Manufacturability and Assembly etc.ObjectiveThe QEDM program is aimed at imparting its students the required skill sets, knowledge, competence and sufficient hands-on experience to successfully perform in careers that involve determining customer requirements, conceiving the solution, designing the product, maturing it to a prototype, optimizing its performance and designing the process to manufacture it while ensuring superior quality and cost competitiveness of the final product. These steps require sound grasp of fundamentals of technologies, engineering and science, innovativeness, competence in analysis and synthesis, understanding of costing and SCM, and ensuring success for the enterprise in the marketplace. The program builds on about 70% of existing UG courses covered in the three years of B Techâ??with some augmentation, followed by two yearsâ?? specialization, project work and internships to ensure competence in applying the principles learned to develop actual product blueprints and manufacturing systems design and operation.IIT MADRAS-EDOverviewThe academic program was aimed towards a five years of B.Tech. and M. Tech. integrated dual-degree course. The program was designed based on the input from the advisory committee consisting of faculty members from various departments and eminent persons from industries. The four important axioms of design engineering – understand the functions of a product and develop concepts, form and control – were imparted through a series of courses.Equal importance was given in the curriculum for fundamental and engineering science and practical applications of these in real life problems.An overview of the curriculum is shown Most of the major theory courses consisted of a component of laboratory either along with the course or following the course. A full-semester industrial project training was been incorporated in the curriculum with the expectation that students will be exposed to the current global design practices. Emphasis was also placed on multidisciplinary group project to provide experience of working in a team to solve an engineering problem as in industry.Two dual degree programs with a specialization in Automotive Engineering (2005 onwards) and Biomedical Design (2008 onwards) were initiated.The curriculum was designed such that a combination of arts, science, engineering and practice was obtained. The first batch of dual-degree students with a specialization in Automotive Engineering was graduated in 2010 and that of with a specialization in Biomedical Design was graduated in 2013. Currently, 282 dual-degree students are on roll.The unique features of this curriculum:i) different teaching laboratories have been setup and importance is also given to laboratories connected with theory subjects andii) one semester long industrial project training.To enhance the motivation of dual degree students following aspects are also noted:i) To increase number of electives which can be offered by a guest faculty member from an industry, ii) To increase industry-student interaction by introducing industrial lectures from the third year, iii) To increase multidisciplinary group projects to provide experience of working in a team to solvean engineering problem as in industry,iv) To insist with the industries to provide challenging industrial projects to VIII semester students during their one-semester long industrial projecttraining.Research Areas:1. Automotive EngineeringVehicle Dynamics, Tyre Mechanics, Mathematical Modelling of Dynamic Systems, Control, Fault, Diagnosis, Automotive Systems, Intelligent Transportation Systems.2. Biomedical DesignMedical Imaging, Biomechanical Modeling, Soft Tissue Mechanics, Bio-Fluid Mechanics, Prosthetic and Scaffold Design, Biomedical Devices and Control Microwave Applications, Tissue Ablation and Hyperthermia Physics, Radiometry, Ergonomics, Rehabilitation Engineering.3. Materials and DesignGeometric and Solid Modeling, Computational Geometry, Shape Search, Shape Optimization, Image Based Reconstruction, Solid Free From Fabrication, Design Theory, Reliability Fatigue and Fracture, Finite Element Analysis, digital Image Correlation, Material Characterization, Structural Health Monitoring, Design with Smart Materials, Sustainable Manufacturing.4. Robotics and MechatronicsParallel Manipulators, Underwater Robots, Path Planning, System Dynamics and Control, Optomechatronics, SensingBoth the instititutions offer good research opportunities but I think IITM-ED has an edge ovet IIT KGP’s QEDM on the context of:Industry Collaborations And PartnershipsResearch and Consultancy ProjectsPublicationsPS: Before taking any decision consult seniors of departments of respective Institutions.

Abstract—Building an electronic voting system that satisfies the legal requirements of legislators has been a challenge for a long time. Distributed ledger technologies is an exciting technological advancement in the information technology world. Blockchain technologies offer an infinite range of applications benefiting from sharing economies. This paper aims to evaluate the application of blockchain as service to implement distributed electronic voting systems. The paper elicitates the requirements of building electronic voting systems and identifies the legal and technological limitations of using blockchain as a service for realizing such systems. The paper starts by evaluating some of the popular blockchain frameworks that offer blockchain as a service. We then propose a novel electronic voting system based on blockchain that addresses all limitations we discovered. More generally this paper evaluates the potential of distributed ledger technologies through the description of a case study, namely the process of an election and implementing a blockchain-based application which improves the security and decreases the cost of hosting a nationwide election.I. INTRODUCTIONIn every democracy, the security of an election is a matter of national security. The computer security field has for a decade studied the possibilities of electronic voting systems [1], with the goal of minimizing the cost of having a national election, while fulfilling and increasing the security conditions of an election. From the dawn of democratically electing candidates, the voting system has been based on pen and paper. Replacing the traditional pen and paper scheme with a new election system is critical to limit fraud and having the voting process traceable and verifiable [2].Electronic voting machines have been viewed as flawed, by the security community, primarily based on physical security concerns. Anyone with physical access to such machine can sabotage the machine, thereby affecting all votes cast on the aforementioned machine.Enter blockchain technology. A blockchain is a distributed, immutable, incontrovertible, public ledger. This new tech- nology works through four main features:(i) The ledger exists in many different locations: No single point of failure in the maintenance of the distributed ledger.(ii) There is distributed control over who can append new transactions to the ledger.(iii) Any proposed “new block” to the ledger must reference the previous version of the ledger, creating an immutable chain from where the blockchain gets its name, and thus preventing tampering with the integrity of previous entries.(iv) A majority of the network nodes must reach a consensus before a proposed new block of entries becomes a permanent part of the ledger.These technological features operate through advanced cryptography, providing a security level equal and/or greater than any previously known database. The blockchain tech- nology is therefore considered by many [3], including us, to be the ideal tool, to be used to create the new modern democratic voting process.This paper evaluates the use of blockchain as a service to implement an electronic voting (e-voting) system. The paper makes the following original contributions: (i) research exist- ing blockchain frameworks suited for constructing blockchain- based e-voting system, (ii) propose a blockchain-based e- voting system that uses “permissioned blockchain” to enable liquid democracy.The reminder of this paper is organized as follows: In sec- tion II, we discuss design considerations for election systems. In section III, we present our blockchain based e-voting system and evaluate some of the popular blockchain frameworks for realizing the system. In section IV, we discuss some of the security and legal considerations and limitations regarding designing an electronic voting system for national elections. Related work is presented in Section V. Finally, conclusions and directions for future work are presented in Section VI.II. PRELIMINARIES OF E-VOTING AND BLOCKCHAINThis section explains the liquid democracy and its design consideration. We then provide an overview of blockchain and smart contract technology and its capabilities as a service for implementing an e-voting system for liquid democracy along with an overview of Zero-Knowledge proofs and their use cases in such systems.A. Liquid Democracy Design ConsiderationsThe main idea in a liquid democracy [6] is that the voter has the power, at any given moment, to review the way his vote was cast in terms of a specific legislative proposal or a bill. This allows people with domain-specific knowledge to better influence the outcome of decisions, which should lead to an overall better governance. The concept of liquid democracy could be a possible answer to the public requests, but there are technical and social barriers in the way. The solution to the technical concerns associated with the liquid democracy concept could be vital for the evolution of democracy as we know it.Below, we list our envisioned essential requirements that need to be fulfilled by an e-voting system in order for it to effectively be used in a national election:(i) An election system should not enable coerced voting.(ii) An election system should not enable traceability of avote to a voters identifying credentials.(iii) An election system should ensure and proof to a voter,that the voters vote, was counted, and counted correctly.(iv) An election system should not enable control to a thirdparty to tamper with any vote.(v) An election system should not enable a single entitycontrol over tallying votes and determining an electionsresult.(vi) An election system should only allow eligible individualsto vote in an electionB. Blockchain as a ServiceThe blockchain technology was introduced in 2008 when Satoshi Nakamoto created the first cryptocurrency called Bit- coin. The Bitcoin blockchain technology uses a decentralized public ledger combined with PoW(Proof-of-Work) based sto- castic concensus protocol, with financial incentives to record a totally ordered sequence of blocks, the blockchain. The chain is replicated, cryptographically signed and publicly verifyable at every transaction so that no-one can tamper with the data that has been written onto the blockchain. The blockchain structure is an append-only data structure, such that new blocks of data can be written to it, but cannot be altered or deleted The blocks are chained in such a way that each block has a hash that is a function of the previous block, providing the assurance of immutability.Whereas the Bitcoin blockchain publishes all elements of the entire chain, in general other types of blockchain can be public, private or consortium based. Public blockchains grant access to read and ability to create a transaction to any user on that network. This type is mostly used for cryptocurrencies (e.g., Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin and Auroracoin). Consor- tium blockchain is a “partially decentralized” blockchain[17], where the consensus process is controlled by a pre-selected set of nodes. Imagine a consortium of 15 financial institutions, each of which operates a node of which 10 must sign every block in order for the block to be valid. The right to read the blockchain can be public or restricted to the participants. Private blockchain limits not only the write access but the read access as well, to specific participants who can verify their transaction internally. That makes the transaction on a private network cheaper, since they only need to be verified by few nodes that are trusted and with guaranteed high processing power. Nodes can be trusted to be very well-connected and faults can quickly be fixed by manual intervention, allowing the use of consensus algorithms which offer finality after much shorter block times.[17]In our proposal, we will use a permissioned blockchain, a variation of the consortium-based chains, which uses the proof-of-authority(POA) consensus algorithm. In proof-of- authority-based networks, transactions and blocks are vali-dated by approved accounts, known as validators. This process is automated and does not require the validators to be con- stantly monitoring their computers. A permissioned blockchain which uses the POA consensus algorithm enables us to set restrictions on a set of selected known entities to validate and certify transactions on the blockchain and censor transactions arbitrarily, with their identity and reputation at stake. This otherwise needs to be done by miners on a public blockchain which uses the proof-of-work consensus algorithm. Rather than employing mining fees, like the public blockchains in operation require, using a permissioned blockchain, validators get payed for the service they provide by acting as validators in the system. Moreover, using a private network limits the possibility for an eavesdropper to monitor traffic or read the incoming data. This is needed to fulfill voting rights so that voters can cast votes without leaking their identity or voting data.1) Smart Contracts: Smart contracts are trackable and irreversible applications that execute in a decentralized en- vironment (e.g., blockchain). Once the smart contract has been deployed nobody can edit the code or change its execution behavior. Smart contract execution guarantees to bind parties together to an agreement as written. This creates a new powerful type of trust relationship that does not rely on a single party. Smart contracts enables better management for realizing and administering digital agreements because they are self-verifying and self-executing[19].The phrase and concept of “smart contracts” is attributed to Nick Szabo, who has a degree in law and computer science. His expressed goal with smart contracts is to bring the highly evolved practices of law to the design of electronic commerce protocols between strangers on the Internet. Ethereum provides an open-source blockchain platform that can be used to deploy smart contracts. Ethereum introduced a new programming language called Solidity (similar to Javascript) to write these contracts. We implement our e-voting system, as a system based on a smart contract in a permissioned blockchain. The functionality in detail will be discussed in Section III.2) Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge proof: Another con- cept that is not directly related to blockchain but can be seen as an essential component for satisfying some of the requirements of building an e-voting system on a blockchain is zero-knowledge proof. A zero-knowledge proof is a cryp- tographical method by which one party, the prover, can prove to another party, the verifier that the prover knows a value x, without revealing any information other than the fact that the verifier knows the value x. A simple example which was first demonstrated live by Konstantinos Chalkias and Mike Hearn[20]. Using the example of “Two balls and the colour- blind friend”, the ZKP works as follows: The prover has two balls, one red and one green, and otherwise identical. The verifier (the friend) is colour-blind. To prove that they are in fact differently coloured, you give the balls to your friend, who hides them behind his back. Your friend then decides whether to switch the balls between hands or not, and then reveals one of the balls. The prover declares if the balls were switched.Fig. 1: ElectionBy repeating this process, the prover can prove that he can correctly identify the balls, as the verifier confirms that the likelihood of repeated success is halved each time.A non-interactive zero-knowledge proof, or NIZKP for short, is a variant of zero-knowledge proofs in which there is no interaction between the prover and verifier. Blum, Feld- man and Micali[21] showed that a common reference string shared between the prover and verifier is enough to achieve computational zero-knowledge without requiring interaction. The Fiat-Shamir heuristic[22] however showed that NIZKPs could also be obtained in the random oracle model, which in practice can be used as a cryptographic hash function instead[23] which enables any user to prove their identity and the authenticity of their message without a shared public key. This scheme is ideally suited for microprocessor-based devices such as smart cards, personal computers and remote control systems. The Fiat-Shamir heuristic therefore provides a simple yet efficient and secure method to authenticate and verify eligible individuals for a voting system while guaranteeing voters privacy.III. BLOCKCHAIN AS A SERVICE FOR E-VOTINGIn this paper, we consider existing electronic voting sys- tems, blockchain-based and non-blockchain-based, and eval- uate their respective feasibility for implementing a national e-voting system (see section VI). Based on this, we devised a blockchain-based electronic voting system, optimizing for the requirements and considerations identified. In the following subsection, we start by identifying the roles and component for implementing an e-voting smart contract then, we evaluate different blockchain frameworks that can be used to realize and deploy the election smart contracts. In the last subsection, we will discuss the design and architecture of the proposed system.A. Election as a Smart ContractDefining a smart contract includes identifying the roles that are involved in the agreement (the election agreement in our case) and the different components and transactions in theroles and processagreement process. We start by explaining the election roles followed by the election process.1) Election Roles: As can be seen in Figure 1, elections in our proposal enable participation of individuals or institutions in the following roles. Where multiple institutions and individuals can be enrolled to the same role.(i) Election administrators: Manage the lifecycle of an election. Multiple trusted institutions and companies are enrolled with this role. The election administrators spec- ify the election type and create aforementioned election, configurate ballots, register voters, decide the lifetime of the election and assign permissioned nodes.(ii) Voters: For elections to which they are eligible for, voters can authenticate themselves, load election ballots, cast their vote and verify their vote after an election is over. Voters can be rewarded for voting with tokens when they cast their vote in an election in the near future, which could be integrated with a smart city project.(iii) District nodes: When the election administrators create an election, each ballot smart contracts, representing each voting district, are deployed onto the blockchain. When the ballot smart contracts are created, each of the corre- sponding district nodes are given permission to interact with their corresponding ballot smart contract. When an individual voter casts his vote from his corresponding smart contract, the vote data is verified by all of the corresponding district nodes and every vote they agree on are appended onto the blockchain when block time has been reached.(iv) Bootnodes: Each institution, with permissioned access to the network, host a bootnode. A bootnode helps the district nodes to discover each other and communicate. The bootnodes do not keep any state of the blockchain and is ran on a static IP so that district nodes find its peers faster.[27]2) Election Process: In our work, each election process is represented by a set of smart contracts, which are instantiated on the blockchain by the election administrators. A smartFig. 2: Election as a smart contractcontract is defined for each of the voting districts of the election so multiple smart contracts are involved in an election. For each voter with its corresponding voting district location, defined in the voters registration phase, the smart contract with the corresponding location will be prompted to the voter after the user authenticates himself when voting.The following are the main activities in the election process:(i) Election creation Election administrators create election ballots using a decentralized app(dApp). This decen- tralized app interacts with an election creation smart contract, in which the administrator defines a list of can- didates and voting districts. This smart contract creates a set of ballot smart contracts and deploys them onto the blockchain, with a list of the candidates, for each voting district, where each voting district is a parameter in each ballot smart contract. When the election is created, each corresponding district node is given permission to interact with his corresponding ballot smart contract (See Figure 2).(ii) Voter registration The registration of voter phase is conducted by the election administrators. When an elec- tion is created the election administrators must define a deterministic list of eligible voters. This requires a component for a government identity verification service to securely authenticate and authorize eligible individu- als. Using such verification services, each of the eligible voter should have an electronic ID and PIN number and information on what voting district the voter is located in. For each eligible voter, a corresponding wallet would be generated for the voter. The wallet generated for each individual voter should be unique for each election the voter is eligible for and a NIZKP could be integrated to generate such wallet so that the system itself does not know which wallet matches an individual voter.(iii) Vote transaction When an individual votes at a voting district, the voter interacts with a ballot smart contract with the same voting district as is defined for any individual voter. This smart contract interacts with the blockchain via the corresponding district node, which ap- pends the vote to the blockchain if consensus is reached between the majority of the corresponding district nodes.Each vote is stored as a transaction on the blockchain whereas each individual voter receives the transaction ID for their vote for verifying purposes (see “Verifying vote” section). Each transaction on the blockchain holds information about whom was voted for, and the location of aforementioned vote. Each vote is appended onto the blockchain by its corresponding ballot smart contract, if and only if all corresponding district nodes agree on the verification of the vote data. When a voter casts his vote, the weight of their wallet is decreased by 1, therefore not enabling them to vote more than once per election. As can be seen in Table I, a single transaction on the public Ethereum blockchain includes the transaction ID, the block which the transaction is located, the age of the transaction, the wallet which sent the transaction and who received it, the total value which was sent and the transaction fee. A transaction in our proposed system doesn’t require all of this information, a single transaction only has information of the transaction ID, the block which the transaction is located at, to which smart contract the transaction was sent, in this example N1SC indicates that the vote was sent from the N1 district. Finally the value of the transaction is the data which was selected to cast, D therefore indicates that the vote casted in this transaction was the the party D. A transaction in our system (see Table II) therefore reveals no information about the individual voter who casted this particular vote. The age of a single transaction is excluded to protect individual voters from a timing attack.TABLE I: Example of an public transaction(Ethereum)TABLE II: Example of an transaction in our system(iv) Tallying results The tallying of the election is done on the fly in the smart contracts. Each ballot smart contract does their own tally for their corresponding location in its own storage. When an election is over, the final result for each smart contract is published.(v) Verifying vote As was mentioned earlier, each individual voter receives the transaction ID of his vote. Each individual voter can go to his government official and present their transaction ID after authenticating himself using his electronic ID and its corresponding PIN. The government official, utilizing district node access to the blockchain, uses the blockchain explorer to locate the transaction with the corresponding transaction ID on the blockchain. The voter can therefore see his vote on theTxHashBlockAgeFromToValue[TxFee]0xdead...133733 sec ago0xbeef...Token10 Ether0.0870xface...133733 sec ago0x4242...0x1234...1 Ether0.056TxHashBlockToValue0xdeadbeef...1337N1SCD0xG1345edf...1330N2SCPblockchain, verifying that it was counted and counted correctly.B. Evaluating Blockchain as a Service for E-VotingTable III shows a comparison between the three blockchain frameworks that we consider for implementing and deploying our election smart contracts. Those are Exonum, Quorum and Geth.1) Exonum: Looking at the Exonum blockchain, it is robust end to end with its full implementation done with the programming language Rust. Exonum is built for private blockchains. It has a customized Byzantine algorithm that is used to achieve consensus in the network. With that consensus algorithm, Exonum can support up to 5000 transactions per second. Unfortunately, the limitation of the framework is that Rust is the only programming language in the current version, which limits the developers to the constructs available in that language. To solve this limitation, Exonum is planning to introduce Java-bindings and platform-independent interface description to make Exonum more developer-friendly in the near future.2) Quorum: Is an Ethereum-based distributed ledger pro- tocol with transaction/contract privacy and new consensus mechanisms. It’s a Geth fork and is updated in line with Geth releases. Quorum changed up the consensus mechanism and aimed more towards consortium chain based consensus algorithms. Using this consensus allows it to support from dozens to hundreds transactions per second.3) Geth: Go-Ethereum or Geth is one of three orginal implementations of the Ethereum protocol and it runs smart contract applications exactly as programmed without possibil- ity of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference [4][24]. This framework supports develmopment beyond the Geth protocol, and is the most developer-friendly framework of the frameworks we evaluated. The transaction per sec- ond(transaction rate) is dependent on whether the blockchain is implmented as a public or private network. Because of these capabilities, Geth was the framework we chose to base our work on, any similar blockchain framework with the same capabilities as Geth should be considered for such systems.C. Design and ImplementationTo introduce a method of secure authentication, our pro- posed system is designed to use electronic ID authentication via Auðkenni[25], which is an Icelandic service provider for identity verification. Auðkenni utilizes the Nexus software and RFID scanners. When a user registers for an electronic ID, a user chooses a PIN number for its corresponding ID consisting of 6 numbers. A user will therefore identify himself in the voting booth by scanning his ID and providing his corresponding PIN number to authenticate himself to the system.1) Any computer in any voting district can be used by any eligible voter to vote, since the wallet for the corresponding voter has information on which voting district the voter isFig. 3: Voter authenticates himself and casts voteFig. 4: Block added to the blockchainsupposed to vote from. For a user to successfully authenti- cate, a valid ID and PIN number needs to be presented at a voting district using a card reader and the nexus software.2) If the authentication is successful, the corresponding smart contract is prompted for the ongoing election. The ballot for the aforementioned election is a smart contract which has a list of the candidates a voter can choose from.3) When a voter has selected a candidate and casts his vote, the voter proceeds to sign his vote by re-entering the corresponding PIN number for his electronic ID.4) After the voter has signed his vote, the vote data proceeds to be verified by the corresponding district node, which the voter is interacting with the smart contract through. If the aforementioned district node accepts the vote data, the vote data must be agreed upon by the majority corresponding district node.5) If the majority of district nodes agree upon the vote data, consensus for the particular vote has been reached. The user then receives the transaction ID for the corresponding transaction of his vote in the form of a QR-code and the There is a way you can gain more in bitcoin like putting your coin in Cryptoavenue.org where you get it doubled in 7 day