Prediction Markets have been used to forecasts outcomes of research interest using market mechanism (See https://www.nature.com/news/the-power-of-prediction-markets-1.20820). A decentralized prediction market, Augur, has been created on blockchain for betting purposes (See, https://www.augur.net/). An alternative approach to prediction market has been proposed in Dalal et al (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0040162511000734). This project proposes to develop a new model for decentralized prediction market which can be used to elicit opinions of university researchers on socially important issues. Specifically, the project will use Ethereum based platform to develop a smart contract and an ERC-20 compliant token for researchers to participate in the new market.
The project has collected a large set of data (>200GB) from a cryptocurrency block chain. It is developing methods for detecting anomalies in transactions based on newer Social Networks, Graph Analysis and Machine Learning methods. The work involves data cleaning/wrangling and creation and implementation of various algorithms and analyzing the transactions for identifying different set of anomalies and manipulations.