IEOR 185 is the Blockchain Lab, led by Luke Kowalski, as part of UC Berkeley's Sutardja Center of Entrepreneurship and Technology(SCET).
**This course counts towards the Sutardja Certificate in Technology and Entrepreneurship. Additional information: https://scet.berkeley.edu/courses/ **
Will another Initial Coin Offering alleviate global poverty? Does the world need a new protocol to avoid an environmental catastrophe?
This course will take a contrarian view and start with a social, environmental, political, or cultural problem. Only then will we look at applicable technologies, inventions, and tools to make an impact. We will present an overview of blockchain, fintech, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and other disruptive technologies that have the potential to transform society or reinvent markets. Students will also learn the basics of entrepreneurship and deploy empathy-driven, user-centered design methods to create a new product and ensure a good problem / solution fit. Guest lectures from industry and academia, hands-on group exercises, and presentation of use cases will help along the way.
The course is structured as an incubator where multidisciplinary student teams will work together on real world deliverables. Over the course of the semester, students will be expected to validate their initial ideas with users, build and launch a working prototype, and develop and present a cogent business plan. At the conclusion of the course, each team will pitch their idea to a panel of venture capitalists and angel investors. The top teams will have the opportunity to transition their companies into one or more Berkeley-related incubator/accelerator programs, including the Blockchain Accelerator.
- Teaching Staff: Luke Kowalski, Rachel Payne, Chanel Shum, Justin Wong
- Fall 2019 had a shifted focus on Social Impact. Teams had thought of ideas ranging from a Food Transaportation Platform to prevent food waste to Blockchain being used for reverse debts and debt tracking. Other ideas included VR Classrooms, Recycle Vending Machines, Crowdsourced Funding Platform, Donor-Nonprofit Matching Platform, and Clothing Quality Classifier for Recycled Clothes.
- The students showed interested in Climate Change and Data Visualizations, which was the main focus for the demo lecture here.
- The Climate Data Visualizations were done in a Jupyter notebook `Climate Data.ipynb`.
- This sourced Carbon Emissions data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA) and European Commission(EC). In the data, carbon emission sources by country from 1970 to 2008 were tracked(and still being tracked) by NOAA and made publicly available. There was an introduction to machine learning, specifically linear regression. At the end, there was a forward for a trash classifier using neural nets.
- Additional Resources from this lecture:
* https://ncics.org/data/noaa-big-data-project/
* https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/overview.php?v=booklet2018
* https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/
* https://seaborn.pydata.org/
- Teaching Staff: Luke Kowalski, Justin Wong
- Spring 2020 had many teams that leveraged the use of Blockchain for their teams. Team ideas coming soon :)
- The students showed interest in Fintech and Blockchain, which was the main focus for the demo lecture here.
- Students had a desire to learn how to connect a front-end application with deployed smart contracts on a blockchain network. The demo leverages Flask and Web3 to render a page that can execute a transaction on the Ganache local blockchain to send an amount from the Sender address to the Recipient Address. There are additional examplse of how to use Python to execute and call smart contracts that are already deployed.
- Additional Resources from this lecture:
* https://remix-ide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/run.html
* https://etherscan.io/token/0x90f64cd258373c6a2bf7f0fc0034d1a95ff6954e#readContract
* https://web3py.readthedocs.io/en/stable/quickstart.html
* https://www.coindesk.com/learn/ethereum-101/how-ethereum-works
* https://www.trufflesuite.com/ganache
* https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/1.1.x/quickstart/
Maintained by Justin Wong