Bell Labs Phd Internship

**Come create the technology that helps the world act together**

Nokia is committed to innovation and technology leadership across mobile, fixed and cloud networks. Your career here will have a positive impact on people’s lives and will help us build the capabilities needed for a more productive, sustainable, and inclusive world.

We challenge ourselves to create an inclusive way of working where we are open to new ideas, empowered to take risks and fearless to bring our authentic selves to work.

**The team you'll be part of**

Nokia Bell Labs is the world-renowned research arm of Nokia, having invented many of the foundational technologies that underpin information and communications networks and all digital devices and systems. This research has produced nine Nobel Prizes, five Turing Awards and numerous other awards.

The Data-Driven Software Systems Research department is an international team of research scientists working at the intersection of software systems and software engineering research. The team’s mission is to shape the future of software systems, from creation to execution.

**What you will learn and contribute to**

One of the earliest approaches of increasing security and Sybil-resistance in public blockchains is based on Proof-of-Work (PoW). Creating new blocks in PoW systems requires nodes to compete for the solution of a cryptographic puzzle (e.g., a hash value with a certain number of leading 0s). Although this approach creates an entry barrier by forcing a potential attacker to invest in costly hardware to solve these puzzles and thus increasing the network’s Sybil-resistance, PoW systems are criticized for their high energy usage. At the heart of the problem lies that PoW does ‘useless computation’. One alternative to PoW is Proof-of-Stake (PoS), where users stake their tokens as collateral for participating in a lottery that picks the block producer. Another alternative is Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW), in which nodes do some maintenance work for the blockchain for block creation. Examples include Proof-of-Coverage in Helium, Proof-of-Storage in Filecoin and Chia, and Proof-of-Relay in New Kind of Network (NKN).

**In this project, you will explore designing and building another alternative: Proof-of-Tangible-Work (PoTW)**. PoTW comes with a twist: Instead of considering the blockchain network as a self-contained bubble, PoTW will also consider direct real-world utility. This proposal is inspired by early web security systems like CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, where there are two goals: In their primary goal, these systems aim to distinguish between bots and real users, by requiring the completion of a task that only humans can perform. This task is then utilized in a secondary goal, such as labeling images, helping digitization of text and improving Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. In a PoTW blockchain, the primary goal is to increase the Sybil-resistance and security by requiring nodes to provide computational resources and performing tasks. The secondary goal is to ensure that those tasks are used to provide additional services to systems external to the blockchain, such as content filtering, classification and ML inference.

In this internship, you will begin 1) designing 2) implementing and 3) evaluating the above system. Along the way, you’ll learn about other decentralized systems, get experience in critical thinking of incentive mechanisms and practice formulating your findings in well-prepared documents and presentations..

**Your skills and experience**
- Enrollment in a PhD program in Computer Science/Engineering is preferred
- Strong background in distributed systems is required
- Familiarity with blockchain technologies and libraries preferred
- Proven track record of research publications in major international conferences/journals is a big plus
- Fluency in English is required

**Tasks**
- Survey decentralized systems, blockchain technologies, cryptography and tokenomics
- Design, implement and evaluate multiple aspects of a blockchain
- Utilize blockchain libraries (e.g., substrate)
- Present your results in well-prepared documents and/or presentations (and work towards a publication)

**What we offer**

Nokia offers flexible and hybrid working schemes, continuous learning opportunities, well-being programs to support you mentally and physically, opportunities to join and get supported by employee resource groups, mentoring programs and highly diverse teams with an inclusive culture where people thrive and are empowered.

During your internship you will get hands-on experience using state-of-the-art software techniques. You will work with a research team to run experiments, build software prototypes and present your findings.

**Nokia is committed to inclusion and is an equal opportunity employer**

Nokia has received the following recognitions for its commitment to inclusion & equality:

- One of the World’s Most Ethical Companies by Ethisphere
- Gender-Equ