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IJCS
1,3 Using blockchain to build trusted
LoRaWAN sharing server
Jun Lin
The Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living for the Elderly
270 (LILY), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
Received 4 August 2017 Zhiqi Shen
Revised 6 September 2017
Accepted 7 September 2017
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore, Singapore
Chunyan Miao
The Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living for the Elderly
(LILY), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore and
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore, Singapore, and
Siyuan Liu
The Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living for the Elderly
(LILY), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

Abstract
Purpose – With the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) market and requirement, low power wide area
(LPWA) technologies have become popular. In various LPWA technologies, Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT) and long
range (LoRa) are two main leading competitive technologies. Compared with NB-IoT networks, which are mainly
built and managed by mobile network operators, LoRa wide area networks (LoRaWAN) are mainly operated by
private companies or organizations, which suggests two issues: trust of the private network operators and lack of
network coverage. This study aims to propose a conceptual architecture design of a blockchain built-in solution
for LoRaWAN network servers to solve these two issues for LoRaWAN IoT solution.
Design/methodology/approach – The study proposed modeling, model analysis and architecture
design.
Findings – The proposed solution uses the blockchain technology to build an open, trusted, decentralized
and tamper-proof system, which provides the indisputable mechanism to verify that the data of a transaction
has existed at a specific time in the network.
Originality/value – To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that integrates blockchain
technology and LoRaWAN IoT technology.
Keywords Internet of things, Blockchain, LoRa, LoRaWAN
Paper type Conceptual paper

© Jun Lin, Zhiqi Shen, Chunyan Miao and Siyuan Liu. Published in the International Journal of
Crowd Science. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the
Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and
International Journal of Crowd
create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to
Science full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at
Vol. 1 No. 3, 2017
pp. 270-280 http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
Emerald Publishing Limited This research is supported by the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office,
2398-7294
DOI 10.1108/IJCS-08-2017-0010 Singapore under its IDM Futures Funding Initiative.
1. Introduction LoRaWAN
As a major research area of crowd science and engineering, the Internet of Things (IoT) is a sharing server
fast-growing industry targeted to transform cities, farms, factories, homes and practically
everything else to be more intelligent and efficient. According to Gartner, the total spending
on IoT devices and services will reach almost $2tn in 2017, and there will be more than 20
billion connected things all over the world by 2020 (Gartner, 2017).
Different IoT technologies can be applied to different application areas and realistic
scenarios. As different application areas have specific requirements and considerations,
271
different technologies are needed. For example, widely installed short-range radio
connectivity (e.g. WIFI, Bluetooth and ZigBee) is not suitable for the scenarios, which
require long-range performance with low bandwidth. Although machine to machine (M2M)
or the 5th generation (5G) solution based on the cellular technology can provide large
coverage, they consume a lot of power. Therefore, Low-Power Wide Area Network
(LPWAN) technologies are proposed, targeting these emerging applications and markets.
“LPWAN” was not proposed until the early of 2013 (LoRa Alliance, 2017a). As the IoT
market rapidly grows, LPWAN rapidly became one of the faster growing areas in IoT.
Many of the LPWAN technologies depicted in Table I have arisen in both licensed and
unlicensed markets, such as SigFox, LoRa, LTE-M and Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT). Among
them, LoRa and NB-IoT are the two leading emergent technologies, which involve many
technical differences.
LoRa is an emerging technology in the current market, which is an LPWAN solution
intended for the systems, which require the ability to send and receive low amounts of data
over a range of 2-20 km with low power costs. The name LoRa comes from its advantage of
long-range capability, which benefits from the long great link budget provided by the
spread spectrum modulation scheme that is a derivative of chirp spread spectrum
modulation (CSS) and which trades data rate for sensitivity within a fixed channel
bandwidth. LoRa uses the unlicensed ISM bands below 1 GHz and is able to transmit over
several kilometers depending on the environment. It is a spread spectrum solution which
uses wide bandwidth to help protect against deliberate interferences or environmental
noises. According to LoRa’s documentation (LoRa Alliance, 2015b), LoRaWAN, the network
used by the LoRa technology, is capable of providing data rates from 0.3 kbps to 50 kbps,
which vary based on the required range and interference. Some experimental research

Technology LoRaWAN SigFox NB-IoT LTE Cat M1

Frequency band 433/868/780/915 MHz 868 MHz/902 MHz Cellular (Licensed Cellular (Licensed Band)
(Unlicensed ISM) (Unlicensed ISM) Band)
Bandwidth 500 Hz-125 kHz 100 kHz 180 kHz 1.08 MHz
Data rate 0.3-50 kbps 10-100 kbps <250 kbps 1 Mbps
Range (km) 2-5 (urban) 3-10 (urban) 2.5-5 2.5-5
15 (suburban) 30-50 (rural)
45 (rural)
Coverage 157 dB 149 dB 164 dB 160 dB
Capacity 40k/cell 50k/cell 200 k/cell 1M/cell
Battery life >10 years >10 years >10 years >10 years
Mobility support Yes No Idle mode Connected þ Idle mode Table I.
Location support Yes No Needs GPS Needs GPS Comparison of
Device cost 1-5$ 5$ <5$ per module <5$per module LPWAN
Governing body LoRa Alliance Sigfox 3GPP 3GPP technologies
IJCS shows that unlicensed LoRa has advantages in terms of battery lifetime, capacity and cost.
1,3 Meanwhile, licensed NB-IoT offers benefits in terms of quality of service, latency, reliability
and range (Sinha et al., 2017). NB-IoT is a narrowband radio technology designed for the
IoT, and is one of a range of Mobile IoT (MIoT) technologies standardized by the
3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), which uses licensed cellular telecommunications
spectrum bands (3GPP TR 36.802, 2016). As spectrum resources are very limited and
272 expensive, network operators need to bid the spectrum licenses from each country’s
government, and the high cost finally will post burdens to customers and end users.
A typical LoRaWAN includes end nodes, gateways, network servers (including network
controller, join server), application servers and customer servers (optionally), as shown in
Figure 1.
End nodes are used to collect and transmit sensor data and sometimes to remotely control
external systems. They are typically low powered and communicate wirelessly with one or
many gateways. A node is normally formed by a LoRa transceiver, which is managed by a
microcontroller unit (MCU). The MCU can send LoRa MAC (media access control) commands
to the transceiver to configure LoRa network settings or to send and receive application data
which the transceiver is responsible for delivering to network servers via gateways. Although
end nodes are able to listen at all times, it is standard for the end node to work in a “call then
listen” configuration, whereby the end node will send data to the network server via gateways
and then have short windows afterwards where it listens for data coming back from the
network server via one gateway, which is called Class A end node in LoRaWAN specification
(LoRa Alliance, 2015a).
Gateways are fewer in number, and transfer data from the end nodes back to the network
server using standard TCP/IP connections. Therefore, LoRaWAN network architecture is

Figure 1.
LoRaWAN
architecture
typically laid out in a star-of-stars topology in which gateways are a transparent bridge LoRaWAN
relaying messages between end nodes and a single network server in the backend. sharing server
Gateways perform no security functionality themselves, but merely act as a conduit to relay
data between end nodes and the network server.
The network server is not so well defined in LoRaWAN specifications but represents the
edge of the systems that would store and parse the data sent from end nodes. To maximize
both battery life of the end nodes and overall network capacity, the LoRaWAN network server
is able to manage the data rate and radio frequency output for each end node individually by 273
means of an adaptive data rate scheme (LoRa Alliance, 2015a). In some LoRaWAN
implementations, the network controller is used for adapting the algorithms to end node-
specific radio parameters and the application type (LoRa Alliance, 2015a), and the join server is
used for security key provisioning during the network join procedure (LoRa Alliance, 2017b). In
several systems deployed in the industry already, e.g. https://loriot.io/ and www.
thethingsnetwork.org/, the network servers are designed as internet-facing Web services to
which the gateways can connect via cellular networks.
Compared with other IoT solutions, the LoRaWAN protocol is equipped with very good
built-in security mechanisms based on proven advanced encryption standard (AES)
cryptography, including the considerations of mutual authentication, integrity protection and
confidentiality. It provides both signing and encryption for parts of network packages. These
are performed using symmetric keys known both to the end node and to the network server, as
well as the application server located behind the network server. Those keys are distributed in
one of two ways depending on how an end node joins the network. The first way by which an
end node is allowed to join a LoRaWAN is through ABP. The end node is shipped with the
DevAddr and both communication session keys: the network session key (NwkSKey) and the
app session key (AppSKey) in advance, which should be unique to the end node.
The NwkSKey is used for network layer security, and the AppSKey is used for application
layer end-to-end security. As the end node already has the information and keys they need, they
can begin communicating with the network server without the need for the network to join the
procedure. Another way is OTAA. In this way, each end node is deployed with a unique 128-bit
AppKey, which is used when the end node sends a join request message. The join request
message is not encrypted, but is signed using this AppKey, which includes the end node’s
unique AppEUI and DevEUI values plus a DevNonce which should be a randomly generated
two-byte value. The AppEUI should be unique to the owner of the device. The DevEUI should
be a globally unique identifier for the device. These three values are signed with a four-
byte message integrity code. The server should check the values and then re-calculate the
message integrity code with the AppKey. If valid, the server will respond with a join accept
message within the receive windows of the end node. The network server generates its own
nonce value (AppNonce), and calculates the end node’s two new 128-bit keys: the AppSKey and
the NwkSKey. Once an end node has joined a LoRaWAN network, through either OTAA or
ABP, all future messages will be encrypted and signed using a combination of NwkSKey and
AppSKey. As the NwkSKey key is only known by the network server and the specific end
node, and the AppSKey key is only known by the application server and the end node, there
should be no way for another end node or a person in the middle attack to recover the cleartext
data. Even the network server cannot decrypt the application data when it has no the AppSKey
in some LoRaWAN deployments (LoRa Alliance, 2017b).
However, public LoRaWAN networks operated by one single organization are facing not
only a security issue but also a trust issue. People trust mobile operators, as they have spent
a lot on the spectrum resources and telecommunication infrastructure that makes customers
believe that operators will not be evil under the strict supervision by the government. But,
IJCS how to let people trust that a public LoRaWAN can help them transport data from gateways
1,3 to application servers without stealing, tampering or cheating? That is our vision in this
paper. The blockchain technology proposed by Nakamoto (2008) that underpins Bitcoin, the
first cypto-currency system, has the potential to overcome aforementioned challenges as a
result of its distributed, secure and private nature. By introducing the blockchain technology
into LoRaWAN, we propose an open, trusted and decentralized LoRaWAN server
274 architecture design. Besides this, the architecture should allow any existing servers to join
into this peer-to-peer network when it follows the design, which will quickly expand the data
processing capacity of the whole network and make it a sharing LoRaWAN system.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows. In Section 1, we review the state of art for
the integration of blockchain and IoT technologies and highlight existing IoT-on-the-
blockchain applications. In Section 3, we propose our blockchain-based LoRaWAN server
architecture design, including the network server inner architecture, message process flow
and blockchain data structure. In Section 4, we present our conclusions.

2. Related work
2.1 Blockchain technology
Blockchain is a peer-to-peer (P2P) distributed and decentralized ledger technology which can be
used to record transactions, agreements, contracts and events (Christidis and Devetsikiotis,
2016). A blockchain is essentially a distributed database of records or public ledger of all
transactions or digital events that have been executed and shared among participating parties.
Unlike other ledger approaches, blockchain guarantees tamper-proof storage of approved
transactions without an intermediary. Each transaction in the public ledger is verified by
consensus of a majority of the participants in the system. And, once entered, information can
never be erased. A blockchain contains a certain and verifiable record of every single
transaction ever made.
Blockchain is originally developed to support crypto-currency, Bitcoin (Nakamoto, 2008), a
decentralized peer-to-peer digital currency, which is the most popular example that uses
blockchain technology. With the success of Bitcoin, the underlying blockchain technology has
worked flawlessly and found a wide range of applications in both the financial and
non-financial world. The main hypothesis of the blockchain technology is that it establishes a
system of creating a distributed consensus in the P2P network. This allows participating
entities to know for certain that a digital event is happening by creating an irrefutable record in
a public ledger.
A blockchain is a mechanism using a P2P that has functions of:
 enabling the transactions whose authenticity is guaranteed (prevent double spend);
 ensuring traceability of data and enabling transparent transactions (tamper-proof);
and
 stably maintaining the ecosystem against any attacks by malicious users without a
central authority.

Attacking a blockchain system has to compromise 51 per cent of the systems to surpass the
hashing power of the target network. Thus, it is computationally impractical to launch an
attack against the blockchain network. Expansively, it can be defined as a protocol to
mutually approve value information on the IoT.
The main technologies underlying blockchain include:
 hash;
 public key cryptography and digital signature;
  P2P; and LoRaWAN
 proof of work (Nakamoto, 2008). sharing server
The blockchain technology provides an indisputable mechanism to verify that the data of a
transaction have existed at a specific time in the block. Moreover, because each block in the
chain contains information about the previous block, the history, position and ownership of
each block are automatically authenticated and cannot be altered. Blockchain resilience
stems from its structure, as it is designed as a distributed network of nodes in which each
275
one of these nodes store a copy of the entire ledger. Hence, when a transaction is verified and
approved by the participating nodes, it is highly impossible to change or alter the
transaction’s data (Morabito, 2017).
The integration of network resources and service abilities across organizations is
typically beneficial for all involved parties, especially for the LoRaWAN network providers.
However, the lack of trust is often a roadblock. Blockchain is an emerging technology for
decentralized and transactional data sharing across a network of untrusted participants. It
can be used to find agreement about the shared state of collaborating parties without
trusting a central authority or any particular participant.
2.2 Integration of blockchain and IoT
There are some researchers who have studied the integration of blockchain and IoT technology.
Christidis and Devetsikiotis discussed how a blockchain–IoT combination can:
 facilitate the sharing of services and resources leading to the creation of a
marketplace of services between devices; and
 allow a user to automate in a cryptographically verifiable manner several existing,
time-consuming workflows.

They pointed out certain issues that should be considered before the deployment of a
blockchain network in an IoT setting: from transactional privacy to the expected value of
the digitized assets traded on the network. The conclusion of their paper is that the
blockchain–IoT combination is powerful and can cause significant transformations across
several industries, paving the way for new business models and novel, distributed
applications (Christidis and Devetsikiotis, 2016).
Biswas and Muthukkumarasamy proposed a blockchain-based security framework to
enable secure data communication in a smart city. They discussed the main advantages of
using blockchain in smart cities, which are:
 the resilience against many threats;
 improved reliability;
 better fault-tolerance capability;
 faster and efficient operation; and
 scalability.

Their conclusion is the integration of the blockchain technology with devices in a smart city
will create a common platform where all devices would be able to communicate securely in a
distributed environment (Biswas and Muthukkumarasamy, 2016).
Dorri et al. (2017) discussed that IoT security and privacy remain a major challenge, mainly
due to the massive scale and distributed nature of IoT networks. Although the blockchain
technology provides decentralized security and privacy, it requires significant energy and
causes delay and computational overhead that is not suitable for most resource-constrained IoT
IJCS devices. Therefore, a lightweight instantiation of a blockchain is proposed, particularly geared
1,3 for use in IoT by eliminating the proof of work (POW) and the concept of coins. This approach
was exemplified in a smart home setting and consists of three main tiers, namely, cloud storage,
overlay and smart home. In this solution, each smart home is equipped with an always online,
high resource device, known as “miner” that is responsible for handling all communication within
and external to the home. The miner also preserves a private and secure blockchain used for
276 controlling and auditing communications. The used simulation results highlight that the
overheads (in terms of traffic, processing time and energy consumption) introduced by our
approach are insignificant relative to its security and privacy gains (Dorri et al., 2017).
Huh et al. (2017) proposed a way to manage IoT devices using Ethereum, an open-source,
public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform featuring smart contract
(scripting) functionality. They use the smart contract script to save data coming from meter
and smart phones. Their experiment shows that using an Ethereum account, a meter
constantly sends electricity use and a smart phone sends policies for air conditioner and
light bulb. And air conditioner and light bulb constantly check the values on Ethereum to
update their devices. When necessary, they switch their modes from normal to energy-
saving. This is a good application example for the integration of blockchain and IoT.
Samaniego and Deters proposed the idea and evaluation of using virtual resources in
combination with a permission-based blockchain for provisioning IoT services on edge
hosts. They thought that moving IoT components from the cloud to edge hosts helps in
reducing overall network traffic, and thus minimizes latency. However, provisioning IoT
services on the IoT edge devices presents new challenges regarding system design and
maintenance. One possible approach is the use of software-defined IoT components in the
form of virtual IoT resources. This, in turn, allows exposing the thing/device layer and the
core IoT service layer as collections of micro services that can be distributed to a broad
range of hosts (Samaniego and Deters, 2016a). In another paper, they discussed the idea of
using the blockchain as a service for IoT and evaluated the performance of a cloud and edge-
hosted blockchain implementation (Samaniego and Deters, 2016b).
Although the aforementioned researchers have explored the integration and
implementation of the blockchain and IoT technologies, they seldom target the LoRaWAN.
LoRaWAN and especially the LPWA are new emerging technologies in recent years, and also
as we discussed before, LoRaWAN already has built-in strong security mechanisms for
building a private network. However, the current main challenge for LoRa technology is not the
security concerns, but the network coverage concerns. Big mobile operators tend to choose
cellular technology-based NB-IoT, as they already have the licensed spectrum resources and
they can recover the expensive cost of building the network from end consumers finally.

3. Proposed method
The market left to LoRaWAN is small-medium enterprises or organizations’ private network.
But for some typical field IoT applications, such as animal tracking, fleet tracking, asset
tracking and smart parking, the network coverage is very important for the quality of service.
It requires a big union network for LoRaWAN to provide consistent services, such as the
roaming service for end user and accounting and settlement service for each party.
Based on concepts of crowdsourcing and sharing economy, we propose the following
blockchain architecture for LoRaWAN servers, which can utilize both advantages of
blockchain technology and LoRaWAN technology to provide an open, trusted, decentralized
and tamper-proof network system.
In Figure 2, the blockchain system is built in the network server layer of LoRaWAN. The
reasons are listed below:
 LoRaWAN
sharing server

277

Figure 2.
Blockchain
architecture for
LoRaWAN server

Figure 3.
LoRaWAN network
server inner
architecture
IJCS  for Gateways: LoRaWAN’s gateways normally are resource-constrained and
1,3 outdoor-deployed IoT devices, which are not suitable to bear too many blockchain
computing functions of security, verification and storage;
 for Join Servers: LoRaWAN’s join servers normally are provided by end node’s
manufactories to produce session keys, which are also not suitable to undertake the
blockchain functions; and
278  for Application Servers: LoRaWAN’s application servers normally are provided by
customers to process core business data, which are also not suitable to undertake
any blockchain function.

In each network server (NS), except the normal functions of LoRaWAN NS, we added
the blockchain management component, which can be communicated with other NS to
fulfill blockchain’s functions. Figure 3 is the inner architecture of the LoRaWAN
network server.
The blockchain manager component implements the blockchain functions of packaging
transaction, hashing transaction, verifying transaction, making block, storing blockchain,

End Note Gateway Network Server Join Server Application Server

join request msg

(DevEUI, AppEUI,DevNonce, forward join request
MIC)
msg Is OTAA

Verify
NwkSKey NwkSKey Verify
forward join accept AppSKey
AppSKey msg

Send data
forward data msg
Verify network data
Verify app data
Valid data
ACK msg forward confirmation
Make one transaction T
msg
Broadcast Hash(T)

Wait and verify more Hash(T) from other

NS until Num of Valid T> = n (e.g. 2000)
Make new block
and mining
Figure 4. If mining successfully then broadcast new block
Message process flow Else accept the new block from other NS
Store the new block into local blockchain

Block 0 Block 1 Block 2

Block Head Block Head Block Head
Block Hash: 0AD4…A09D Block Hash: AD87…776C Block Hash: 897A…4452
Parent Hash: NIL
Timestamp: 102983736
Parent Hash: 0AD4…A09D
Timestamp: 103456783
Parent Hash: AD87…776C
Timestamp: 105509843
…
Difficulty: 299028272663 Difficulty: 409028272663 Difficulty: 11029987755
Nonce: 21109287 Nonce: 34789283 Nonce: 18297465
Figure 5. Merkle Root (Trans. Hash: Merkle Root (Trans. Hash: Merkle Root (Trans. Hash:
D98A…098C C89A…B878 78A2…DD87
Example of
blockchain data List of Transactions: List of Transactions: List of Transactions:
{T1, T2, T3 … T1999, {T2001, T2002 … T3999, {T4001, T4002 … T5999,
structure T2000} T4000} T6000}
etc. A message process flow is shown in Figure 4. If the message is sent from the ABP mode, LoRaWAN
then the steps of joining network can be ignored. sharing server
Figure 5 below shows how the blockchain data structure is stored in each NS node. The
hash values on the blockhead will be different in implementation. In Figure 5, the number of
transactions in one block is 2000, which can also be changed when necessary. For some
lightweight client of the network server, it allows only storing the blockheads without the
full blockchain, but still can use the simplified payment validation (SPV) method to verify 279
that confirmed transactions are part of a block, without providing the full ledger to
download (Gervais et al., 2014).

4. Conclusion
It should be clear to all developers of LoRaWAN solutions that LoRa and the LoRaWAN
protocols allow secure solutions to be developed that protect companies and the end users from
cyber-attacks. However, using LoRa and LoRaWAN does not guarantee the trust of network
operators. In this paper, we proposed a blockchain built-in solution for LoRaWAN network
servers. Our solution uses the blockchain technology to build an open, trusted, decentralized
and tamper-proof system, which provides the indisputable mechanism to verify that the data of
a transaction has existed at a specific time in the network. To the best of our knowledge, this is
the first work that integrates blockchain technology and LoRaWAN IoT technology. This
integration utilizes advantages of both technologies. In the future, we also can use smart
contract script technology to define automated trading model in the IoT network. But even
without it, some basic functions like billing and roaming could be used in an automatic way in
the LoRaWAN. In further studies, we would like to build fully scaled LoRaWAN blockchain
networks to link customers’ gateways and application servers.

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About the authors

Jun Lin is a Research Fellow of the Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living for
the Elderly (LILY), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and an Associate Professor of
College of Software, Beihang University, China. He holds a PhD degree from the School of Computer
Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His current research
interests include LoRaWAN, Blockchain, Internet of Things, Crowd Science, Software Engineering
and AI technologies. Jun Lin is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: [email protected]
Zhiqi Shen is a Senior Scientist of School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang
Technological University, Singapore. He obtained his BSc degree in Computer Science and Technology
from Peking University, MEng in Computer Engineering from Beijing University of Technology, and
PhD from Nanyang Technological University. His research interests include artificial intelligence,
software agents, multi-agent systems, goal oriented modeling, agent oriented software engineering,
semantic web/grid, e-Learning, Bioinformatics and Bio-manufacturing, agent augmented interactive
media, game design and interactive storytelling.
Chunyan Miao is a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCSE), Nanyang
Technological University. Professor Miao is currently serving as the Founding Director of the Joint
NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living for the Elderly (LILY). LILY is one of the
first research centers focused on artificial intelligence technologies for helping the elderly lead an
active, healthy and dignified lifestyle.
Siyuan Liu got her BSc and MSc degrees in Computer Science from Peking University, China in
2002 and 2005, respectively. She obtained her PhD degree from Nanyang Technological University
(NTU), Singapore, in 2013. She is currently a Research Fellow in Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of
Excellence in Active Living for the Elderly (LILY). Her research interest includes trust and reputation
in multi-agent systems and incentive mechanism design in crowdsourcing.

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