The seventh edition of the BRAIN workshop (https://sites.google.com/unipi.it/brain-2026/), i.e. BRAIN 2026, took place during PerCom 2026 on the 16th of March 2026 in Pisa, Italy. The workshop was in person (beside motivated exceptions due to travel disruptions in the Middle East) and divided in four sessions.
The workshop hosted the following keynote session:
"KEYNOTE: Interoperability in the Age of Web 3.0" by Sandip Chakraborty, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India
Twelve (12) papers of the many submitted were accepted for publication, after 3 reviews each. The affiliation countries of speakers were the following:
Australia
China
Italy
Japan
United States of America
The sixth edition of BRAIN workshop (https://sites.google.com/unipi.it/brain-2025/), i.e. BRAIN 2025, took place during PerCom 2025 on the 21st of March 2025 in Washington DC, United States of America. The workshop was exclusively in person and divided in Four sessions.
The workshop hosted the following keynote sessions and tutorials:
"KEYNOTE: Trust in Self-Sovereign Identity: Balancing Privacy, Accountability, and Usability" by Helen Paik, University of New South Wales, Australia
"TUTORIAL: AWESOME: Analysis framework for WEb3 SOcial MEdia" by Laura Ricci, University of Pisa, Italy
Eight (8) papers of the many submitted were accepted for publication, after 3 reviews each. The affiliation countries of speakers were the following:
Australia
Germany
Italy
Japan
Norway
The fifth edition of BRAIN workshop (https://sites.google.com/view/brain-2024/), i.e. BRAIN 2024, took place during PerCom 2024 on the 15th of March 2024 in Biarritz, France. The workshop was exclusively in person and divided in Four sessions.
The workshop hosted the following keynote sessions and tutorials:
"KEYNOTE: Complex Systems Oriented Approach for dApps Analysis" by Giuseppe Destefanis, Brunel University London, United Kingdom
"TUTORIAL: Blockchain for IoT Access Control: Challenges and Oppurtunites" by Shantanu Pal, Deakin University, Australia
Eight (8) papers of the many submitted were accepted for publication, after 3 reviews each. The affiliation countries of speakers were the following:
Australia
Germany
Italy
Spain
United Kingdom
The fourth edition of BRAIN workshop (https://sites.google.com/view/brain-2023/), i.e. BRAIN 2023, took place during PerCom 2023 on the 13th of March 2023 in Atlanta, USA. The workshop was almost exclusively in person and divided in Four sessions.
The workshop hosted the following keynote sessions and tutorials:
"KEYNOTE: Blockchain beyond cryptocurrencies: enabling real-time and data-intensive applications on blockchain" by Fabio Severino, CTO of Traent Srl (traent.com), Italy
"TUTORIAL: The impact of Distributed ledger Technology on the evolution of electronic voting systems" by Ricardo Daniel Lopes Almeida, University of Pisa/University of Camerino, Italy
Seven (7) papers of the fourteen (14) submitted were accepted for publication, for an acceptance rate of 50%, after 3 reviews each. The authors affiliation of submissions ranged from Japan to the United Kingdom while the affiliation countries of authors of accepted papers and keynotes were:
France
Italy
Japan
Spain
United Kingdom
Smart contracts Analysis
Martina Rossini; Mirko Zichichi; Stefano Ferretti. On the Use of Deep Neural Networks for Security Vulnerabilities Detection in Smart Contracts
Luca Olivieri; Thomas Jensen; Luca Negrini; Fausto Spoto. MichelsonLiSA: A Static Analyzer for Tezos
Francesco Spegni; Lorenzo Fratini and Massimiliano Pirani; Luca Spalazzi. ChoEn: A Smart Contract Based Choreography Enforcer
Chihiro Kado and Naoto Yanai; Jason Paul Cruz; Shingo Okamura. An Empirical Study of Impact of Solidity Compiler Updates on Vulnerabilities
DLT theory and applications
Azam Khan; Ashiq Anjum. Optimizing Data Distribution to Balance Scalability-Redundancy Trade-off in Blockchains
Maria Ilaria Lunesu; Roberto Tonelli; Andrea Pinna; Simone Sansoni. Soulbound Token for Covid-19 Vaccination certification
Francesco Bruschi; Donatella Sciuto; Tommaso Paulon; Andrea Marchesi. A decentralized approach to award game achievements
The third edition of BRAIN workshop (https://sites.google.com/view/brain-2022/), i.e. BRAIN 2022, took place during PerCom 2022 on the 21st of March 2022. The workshop was entirely on line and divided in Four sessions. The presentations where carried on via Whova.
The workshop hosted two keynote sessions:
"Payment Channels" by Matteo Maffei, Full professor, Technical University Wien, Austria
"Blockchain consensus protocol from Bitcoin to Ethereum 2.0" by Sara Tucci Piergiovanni, Head of Laboratory, Senior Research Engineer at CEA LIST, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
Seven (7) papers of the fourteen (14) submitted were accepted for publication, for an acceptance rate of 50%, after 3 reviews each. The authors affiliation of submissions ranged from Australia to the United States of America while the affiliation countries of authors of accepted papers and keynotes were:
Australia
Austria
China
France
Italy
Netherlands
Blockchain Applications
Flavio Corradini; Alessandro Marcelletti; Andrea Morichetta; Andrea Polini; Barbara Re; Francesco Tiezzi. A Choreography-Driven Approach for Blockchain-Based IoT Applications
Kathy Nguyen; Shantanu Pal; Zahra Jadidi; Ali Dorri; Raja Jurdak. A Blockchain-Enabled Incentivised Framework for Cyber Threat Intelligence Sharing in ICS
Tianyu Li; Jelle Vos; Zeki Erkin. Decentralized Private Freight Declaration & Tracking with Data Validation
Francesco Bruschi; Vincenzo Rana; Tommaso Paulon; Donatella Sciuto. A protocol for on-chain tenders
Blockchain Theory and Analysis
Alessandro Brighente; Martina Camaioni; Mauro Conti; Emilio Olivastri. Should I Mine or Should I Break: On the Worthiness of Brute-Forcing Cryptocurrency Addresses
Xianning Meng; Hongda Li; Peifang Ni; Haixia Xu. A Conflict-Free Redactable Blockchain
Cheick Tidiane Ba; Matteo Zignani; Sabrina Gaito. The role of groups in a user migration across blockchain-based online social media
The second edition of BRAIN workshop (https://sites.google.com/view/brain-2021/), i.e. BRAIN 2021, took place during ISCC 2021 on the 5th of September. The workshop was entirely on line and divided in three sessions. The presentations where carried on via zoom.
Five (5) papers of the thirteen (13) submitted were accepted for publication, for an acceptance rate of 38%, after 3 reviews each. The authors affiliation of submissions ranged from Australia to the United States of America while the affiliation countries of authors of accepted papers were:
Canada
Italy
United States of America
Blockchain Applications
Ahmed Khoumsi (University of Sherbrooke, Canada). An Efficient Blockchain-Based Electric Vehicle Charging Management System
Principles behind blockchain
Matthew C Ding (MIT PRIMES & Westford Academy, USA). An Analysis of Multi-Hop Iterative Approximate Byzantine Consensus with Local Communication
Francesco Mogavero (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy); Ivan Visconti (Universita' di Salerno, Italy); Andrea Vitaletti (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy); Marco Zecchini (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy). The Blockchain Quadrilemma: When Also Computational Effectiveness Matters
Unlocking smart contracts potential
Francesco Bruschi (Politecnico di Milano, Italy); Tommaso Paulon (Politecnico di Milano, Italy); Vincenzo Rana (Politecnico di Milano, Italy); Donatella Sciuto (Politecnico di Milano, Italy). A Privacy Preserving Identification Protocol for Smart Contracts
Paolo Bottoni (Sapienza - University of Rome, Italy); Remo Pareschi (University of Molise, Italy); Domenico Tortola (University of Molise, Italy); Nicola Gessa (ENEA, Italy); Gilda Massa (ENEA, Italy). Distributed Ledgers to Support Revenue-Sharing Business Consortia: A Hyperledger-Based Implementation
The first edition of BRAIN workshop (https://sites.google.com/view/brain-2020/), i.e. BRAIN 2020, took place during ISCC 2020 on the 7th of July. The workshop was entirely on line and divided in two presentations blocks. The presentations where carried on via zoom, with a backup pre-recorded video presentation and slides deck, in case of connectivity issues or time zones incompatibilities.
Eight (8) papers of the twenty-one (21) submitted were accepted for publication, for an acceptance rate of 38%, after 3 or 4 reviews each. The authors affiliation of submissions ranged from Australia to the United States of America while the affiliation countries of authors of accepted papers were:
Australia
Austria
Ireland
Italy
Netherlands
North Macedonia
Norway
Spain
United Kingdom
Bitcoin
Liam Hickey and Martin Harrigan. The Bisq DAO: On the Privacy Cost of Participation
Muntadher Sallal, Gareth Owenson and Mo Adda. Security and Performance Evaluation of Master Node Protocol in the Bitcoin Peer-to-Peer Network
Applications
Nikita Karandikar, Antorweep Chakravorty and Chunming Rong. RenewLedger : Renewable energy management powered by Hyperledger Fabric
Radu Prodan and Nishant Saurabh. Decentralized Social Media Applications as a Service: a Car-Sharing Perspective
Diego Pennino, Maurizio Pizzonia, Andrea Vitaletti and Marco Zecchini. Binding of Endpoints to Identifiers by On-Chain Proofs
Technical proposals
Francesco Bruschi, Manuel Tumiati, Vincenzo Rana, Mattia Bianchi and Donatella Sciuto. A Decentralized System for Fair Token Distribution and Seamless Users Onboarding
Peter Robinson. Performance Overhead of Atomic Crosschain Transactions
Analysis
Pierluigi Freni, Enrico Ferro and Roberto Moncada. Tokenization and Blockchain Tokens Classification: a morphological framework