Current Positions

Blockchain Consultant

Freelance

Blockchain, Tokenomics, Cosmos SDK, Tendermint, Mainnet Launch

As a Blockchain Architect, I specialize in designing and architecting robust blockchain-based systems for companies seeking to leverage decentralized technologies. With a strong focus on the Cosmos ecosystem, I provide expert advisory services to guide clients through the technical and strategic aspects of their blockchain projects. My contributions range from solving the technical challenges to providing insights on token design, distribution models, and economic incentives ensuring clients achieve optimal network participation and value capture.

April 2023 - Now

more about this

Chief Blockchain Architect

Ki Foundation

Blockchain, IoT, Cryptocurrency, Cosmos SDK, Tendermint, Proof of Stake, Proof of Reputation

At the Ki Foundation I've embraced diverse roles:

🚀 Spearheaded the design of Proof of Reputation (PoR), a groundbreaking validator selection algorithm for blockchain decentralization on Cosmos SDK and Tendermint.

🌐 Orchestrated the launch of KiChain, handling client development, chain tokenomics, validator onboarding, contributed to early Cosmos tooling such as wallets, monitors and ETH bridge and wrote technical posts and tutorial to explain the Cosmos SDK concepts and tool usage.

🔄 Steered the design of Atlas, a compliant yield aggregator and AMM native to Ki Chain. Authored functional specifications, developed a PoC, and reviewed smart contract specs and frontend designs.

📊 Continuously feeding product and Defi decision making through on-chain and off-chain data analysis over various products.

🎯 Continuously contributing in (i) maintaining the foundation relationships with ecosystem partners, (ii) in the evaluation, deliberation, and provision of guidance pertaining to governance proposals on multiple ecosystem chains for the foundation’s in-house staking service (Klub Staking) as well as foundation delegation.

Nov 2018 - Now

more about this

Founder

Invicta Stake

Blockchain, Data Science, dPoS, Python, VueJS, Web3

Invicta Stake is a professional-grade community validator for dPoS Cosmos SDK based chains. Within the Invicta team, I collaborate alongside a seasoned site reliability engineer and a proficient DeFi analyst. After launching Invicta and on-boarding my teammates into the Cosmos ecosystem, my effort were realigned across two key fronts: (i) firstly, managing relationships with delegating foundations and teams and (2) assuming a hands-on role in the development of essential tools such as crypto wallets, crypto portfolio management tools and blockchain data analysis dashboard mainly using python and TS. Invicta’s validation operations concluded at the end of August 2023, to focus on on-chain data analysis and web3 tooling.

Some tools developed within this project : Whale finder, Web wallet

March 2021 - Now

more about this

Experience

ATER - University Lecturer and Researcher

IUT - University of Lyon 1 - France

software engineering, teaching, UML, JAVA

Process modeling UML : Lectures and seminars

Usecase, Class, Activity, Sequence and State diagrams

JAVA Programming : Lectures and seminars

Basics, databases, multithreading, graphical UI and other stuff

2017- 2018

more about this

PhD Computer Science

IRIXYS - Without walls - International

DRIM - INSA Lyon - France

DIMIS - University of Passau - Germany

Crowdsourcing, machine learning, data mining, quality control, clustering, Python, Java, CrowdFlower

Title : Quality Control in Crowdsourcing Systems

Abstract : In the last decade, crowdsourcing (CS) has emerged as a very promising approach for obtaining services, feedback or data from a large number of people connected through the Internet, in a short time and at a reasonable cost. CS has been used in a large range of contexts, thus proving its versatility. However, the quality of the services or data provided by the workers (the ”crowd”) is not guaranteed, and therefore must be verified. This verification usually results in additional time and cost. We propose a novel approach of quality control in crowdsourcing that reduces, and in some cases eliminates, this overhead. Our approach uses a learning technique to characterize and cluster tasks, and selects, within the available crowd, the most reliable group of workers for a given type of tasks.

2014-2018

more about this

Engineering intern - Computer vision

Atomic and Alternative Energy Agency CEA/LIST/LVIC - Saclay - France

SLAM, augmented reality, camera calibration, projective geometry, C++, Ogre3D

Duration : 6 months

Title : Augmented Reality on Transparent Screens - the driving assistance usecase

Abstract : The first part of this internship consisted in implementing an Over-Transparent-Display Augmented Reality system for driving assistance. Three component were implemented; a user tracking module, a SLAM based environment real-time scanner and a calibration system with bundle adjustment. The second part of he internship consisted in improving the theoretical part of the calibration algorithm to fulfil the client requirements. A 2D calibration process was proposed instead of the 3D calibration.

2014

more about this

Developer intern - Collaborative systems

SESAR Lab - University of Milan - Italy

Liferay, Java, SQL

Duration : 4 months

Abstract : The internship work consisted in designing and implementing a log capturing and storing system for a collaborative work platform base don Liferay.

2013

more about this

Developer intern - Creating web-based virtual visits

Antonin University, TICKET lab - Baabda - Lebanon

MM databases, Virtual visits, Web developpement, CBIR

Duration : 3 months

2012

more about this

Technical skills

Programming

3rd Generation Languages

TS/JS, Python, GO

Databases, Web and Process modeling

Postgres, VueJS, JavaScript, UML

Python libraries

Fast API, Dash, Scikit-learn, Gensim, NLTK, Seaborn, Pandas

Smart Contract

CosmWasm, Rust

Languages

English : Full proficiency

French : Full proficiency

Arabic : Mother Tongue

German : B1 Level - Goethe Institut

Education

Engineering diploma - Computer science and electronics

ESIREM - Dijon - France

Network administration, security and quality, software engineering, project management

Graduated with high distinction - Top of my class

2012-2014

more about this

Master of research - Image processing

University of Burgundy - Dijon - France

Geometrical modeling, image processing, information systems

Graduated with high distinction - Top of my class

2013-2014

more about this

Engineering diploma - Telecommunications and networks

Antonin University - Baabda - Lebanon

Telecommunications, electonics, software engineering

Graduated with high distinction - Top of my class

2009-2014

Publications

Assessing decentralization is DPoS environments

Ki Foundation - Technical report

Tarek Awwad, Julien Guyomard, Reda Berrehili

2019

The Proof Of Reputation protocol

Ki Foundation - Technical report

Tarek Awwad, Julien Guyomard, Reda Berrehili

2019

CrowdED and CREX : Towards Easy Crowdsourcing Quality Control Evaluation

ADBIS 2019, Bled - Slovenia

Tarek Awwad, Nadia Bennani, Veronika Rehn-Sonigo, Lionel Brunie and Harald Kosch

2019

Efficient Worker Selection Through History Based Learning

CompSac 2017, Turin - Italy

Tarek Awwad, Nadia Bennani, Konstantin Ziegler, Veronika Rehn-Sonigo, Lionel Brunie and Harald Kosch

2017

Task Characterization For An Effective Worker Targeting In Crowdsourcing

HASE 2016, Orlando - USA

Tarek Awwad, Nadia Bennani, Lionel Brunie, David Coquil, Harald Kosch and Veronika Rehn-Sonigo

2016

Software and resources

CrowdED - Crowdsourcing Evaluation Dataset


Source code (Github)

CrowdED is a crowdsourcing evaluation dataset. It consists of 300K+ contributions collected from 400 workers for 1000+ questions distributed over 500+ tasks. It also contains a declarative profiles for each worker, a self evaluation (1-5 rating) in different knowledge domains and a crowdsource consistency relevance of this profile. Tasks belong to various domains such as sport, fashion, economy, politics etc., and have different types, relevance judgment, data annotation, image labelling etc.

Dataset

more about this

CREX - Create Enrich EXtend

Python, Javascript, PHP

Source code (Github)

UI Demo - BETA

CREX (CReate, Enrich, eXtend) is a framework allowing the creation the extension and the enrichment of crowdsourcing datasets such as CrowdED. CREX allows a clustering based tasks selection and the generation of crowdsourcing campaign sites. Code is in Python for the computational parts and in Javascript for the campaign generation tool.

Software

more about this

WSP - Worker Selection Platform

Python

Source code will be added ASAP

CAWS is a framework that learns during an offline stage the relation between the various types of tasks and the declarative profiles of reliable workers. The task types are determined through a content-based clustering process. The learned models are then used in an online stage to select reliable workers within the available crowd.

Software

more about this

Talks and presentations

Workshops

IRIXYS workshops

November'14 - Besançon - France
Enabling Resilience in Crowd Computing systems
June'15 - Passau - Germany
Quality Control in Crowdsourcing Systems
December'15 - Lyon - France
Task Characterization For Efficient Worker Selection in Crowdsourcing
June'16 - Gargnano - Italy
Crowdsourcing Quality Control: A Recommender System Approach
November'16 - Lyon - France
Crowdsourcing Quality Control: A Recommender System Approach
July'17 - Chiemsee - Germany
History-based Learning for Worker Selection in Crowdsourcing Systems
Juin'18 - Gargnano - Italy
CrowdED and CREX: Enabling Crowdsourcing Quality Control Evaluation
December'18 - Passau - Germany
Context-aware Worker Selection For Efficient Quality Control in Crowdsourcing

Conferences

HASE 2016

January'16 - Orlando - USA

CompSac 2017

July'17 - Torino - Italy

ADBIS 2019

September'19 - Bled - Slovenia

Course participation

INSA Lyon - Computer Science department

Since 2019

I participate yearly in the Blockchain course as an Blockchain expert to share with the 4th year engineering students the technical insights and advances of the Web3 industry.