MEGA-ACE: Multidisciplinary Educational Global Alliance for Algorand Center of Excellence

MEGA-ACE is a multi-institute collaboration network led and coordinated by the Purdue Blockchain Lab and including partners from top universities around the globe — Cornell, UCLA, Texas A&M, RPI, Ecole Polytechnique, NTUA, Bar-Ilan, Reichman, IIT Bobmay, IIT Madras, University of Nairobi, UNAM, University of Buenos Aires, and ANU — and from the industry we have partnered with Stealth Software Technologies, and CoinFabrik. Funded by Algorand Foundation's selective Algorand Centers of Excellence (ACE) program, MEGA-ACE  aims to transform the blockchain landscape.

We are motivated by concrete problems, and aim to construct end-to-end solutions for them, starting from foundational theory and going all the way to applications. The problems require multidisciplinary approaches, since they involve issues in areas ranging from economics and social choice to cryptography to architecture. The mission of MEGA-ACE is to become a powerhouse for blockchain research, a forum for the exchange of ideas in the area, a center for training students in countries that currently do not provide such training, and an enabler for the mobility for personnel (senior, junior, and students) within the MEGA-ACE network.

MEGA-ACE by design will have a global footprint, which will enable it to focus on diversity and inclusion. Coordinated and led by Purdue, MEGA-ACE involves 9 countries in 5 continents. 28 senior investigators from 7 scientific areas, and dozens of graduate students and postdocs of every gender, color, race, and ethnicity; an ambitious interdisciplinary research agenda with blockchain problems, which only a team like ours can tackle; research-driven applications for end-to-end solutions in the Algorand ecosystem that address infrastructure problems in our partners’ local communities (Argentina, Greece, India, Kenya, Mexico); a teaching agenda aiming to touch millions of students in the whole globe with multi-lingual material; and over 30 collaborative events (workshops, schools, hackathons, blockchain days) that promise to seed blockchain research in all our partners’ institutes.