Ioanna Karantaidou, a PhD student in 性视界传媒鈥檚 College of Engineering and Computing鈥檚 Computer Science Department, has won a one-year fellowship from Protocol Labs, where she will work on their Fielcoin project, investigating innovations in cloud storage.聽Her fellowship is for $60k, which will cover tuition, travel, healthcare costs, and salary.
Cloud storage is dominated by a few large organizations and Filecoin seeks to decentralize this important service by allowing numerous small entities to provide storage 鈥撯 even someone with a hard drive could sign up as a provider. But while users may be comfortable saving files in an established company such as Google Drive, they may not have the same trust in a decentralized service with which they are unfamiliar. Karantaidou鈥檚 work centers on establishing protocols that will test to ensure service providers are behaving honestly and incentivize them to do so. The goal is for these measures to ultimately lead to greater client trust and more widespread use of decentralized cloud storage services.
Karantaidou says her journey into the field 鈥渕akes sense.鈥 Growing up in Greece she enjoyed math and wanted to study computers, so got involved in informatics. She says, 鈥淚n Greece, you don鈥檛 have a double major, so I have two bachelor鈥檚 degrees - in math and computer science - and cryptography is at the intersection of those two. It was my favorite class in both programs.鈥澛犅
Karantaidou鈥檚 advisor at Mason is Foteini Baldimtsi, an assistant professor in the computer science department.