In the first and second blog posts of this series “A week in the life of an IOTA Research Intern”, I gave you an overview of how I got involved with IOTA, how the foundation works day-to-day, and gave you a brief technical background on my chosen research topic: the design of a Decentralised Random Number Generator (dRNG). My internship with IF has now officially come to an end, so in this final blog post, I will reflect on my experience and talk about what is next for me.

In the final week of my internship, I shared with the whole foundation a technical report outlining the requirements for IOTAs dRNG. I received some excellent feedback from colleagues in my research team and also from people from other teams. They all had opinions and constructive ideas to share. I compiled my final report, including an analysis of a number of existing dRNGs and a design of a dRNG to fit the needs of the post-Coordicide IOTA network.

I have started my PhD now at the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London, where I will be studying IOTA’s potential to solve problems in smart cities, and cyber physical systems. Our group is funded by IF for this important research, and we have a number of exciting projects underway which IOTA will play a key role in. The links I have made with other researchers during my internship have laid a brilliant groundwork for the work I will be doing over the next three years.

I have learned a huge amount about my technical subject, as well as about how the foundation works during this internship, and I can’t think of a better way to have lead up to my PhD.

I’ll still be on Discord, so please feel free to connect with me there.