Nomadic Labs Research Seminars #14 | On Oracles and Contract Modules

Описание: The Nomadic Labs Research Seminars series is dedicated to promoting and discussing the extensive list of Tezos research and development projects.

The series includes live presentations from major research projects happening within the Tezos ecosystem. These hour-long sessions consist of an expert-led presentation for 45 minutes plus a 15 minutes live Q&A between developers, academics, and members of the Tezos community.

This session features a presentation by Peter Thiemann, a full professor at the computer science department of the University of Freiburg. In this talk, Peter discusses oracles, means of connecting the outside world with the blockchain. An oracle can provide a trusted reference to a real-world object or it can provide triggers for contracts on the blockchain. His team studies the means to provide high-quality oracles on the Tezos blockchain and offer two approaches: a type-safe contract API and contract modules. To validate the API, they develop an execution model to study type-safety of the interaction between the oracle program and the blockchain and they provide an OCaml implementation of the API.

Peter Thiemann is a full professor at the computer science department of the University of Freiburg where he leads the programming languages research group. His research interests comprise theory and practice of modern programming languages, in particular typing, program analysis, and program transformation. The focus of his recent research is on gradual typing, advanced type systems for communication, and
their application in the setting of blockchains.