Apurba Pokharel

Student at life


About my research | Apurba Pokharel

About my research

Short Explanation

My research dives into the use of LLMs and how to efficiently use them for solving problems with high agreement (unanimity). My research also explores the integration of autonomous systems into existing solutions and frameworks.

Full Fledged Explanation

My research involves a combination of two major disciplines: blockchains and LLMs.

We initially raised the questions “Why is there no true unanimous consensus for blockchains?” and “Can we use Blockchains for collaborative problem solving at a consensus level?” or in other words, can we design a consensus protocol for a distributed ledger system that is based on collaboration and deliberation, where the miners come to unanimous consensus. Granted, this is a very unorthodox and, for some, even a blasphemous problem to attempt to solve, but Dr. Dantu has instilled in me his joy of solving the unsolvable, or at least “taking a stab at it,” as he frequently puts it. My 1st paper, titled “Deliberation Leads to Unanimous Consensus,” explores this purely from a theoretical perspective. Building on this, we asked ourselves the question based on a video we saw a long time ago. “Can we have autonomous agents capable of deliberation?”, so the result of exploring this question is the work done in my second paper. The proof of concept implementation, where we took an open source blockchain (Nimiq), changed its consensus protocol, and built a deliberation framework that serves as the new consensus protocol, will be made public as soon as the paper is accepted for publication.

With this, we now ask ourselves a new question: “This deliberation protocol is for definitive deliberation, but what about subjective deliberation?”. So we will be taking a stab at this for the next work.

Collaboration at UNT

My lab, the Network Security Lab NSL, is a lab where we study and propose solutions to the next generation of networks. Over the 20 years that NSL has been around, it has addressed and proposed novel solutions ranging from next-gen 911 to using electromagnetic waves for 3D spatial rendering, all the way to blockchains, AI, blockchain for AI, AI for blockchain (my research), quantum computing, and now LLMs. We solve a plethora of problems and are a highly collaborative lab. As a result, my publications have papers from diverse scopes of computer science.

Published papers while at UNT

  1. Apurba Pokharel, Ram Dantu, Shakila Zaman, Sirisha Talapuru, Vinh Quach, “Deliberation Leads to Unanimous Consensus” International Conference on Blockchain Computing and Application (BCCA), 2024. (Accepted and Published, Link)
  2. Apurba Pokharel, Ram Dantu, Shakila Zaman, Sirisha Talapuru, Vinh Quach, “Achieving Unanimous Consensus in Decision Making Using Multi-Agents” arXiv. (Preprint, Under Review, Link)
  3. Shakila Zamam, Ram Dantu, Apurba Pokharel, Sirisha Talapuru, Vinh Quach, “ Indivisible State Mirroring in cross-Chain Atomic Swap across Heterogeneous Blockchain” International Conference on Blockchain Computing and Application (BCCA), 2024. (Accepted and Published, Link)
  4. Shakila Zamam, Ram Dantu, Apurba Pokharel, Sirisha Talapuru, Vinh Quach, “ Race-Resistant Atomic Swaps Across Heterogeneous Blockchains” IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures (DAPPS), 2025. (Accepted)
  5. V. Quach, R. Dantu, S. Talapuru, S. Zaman, A. Pokharel, “ZCube: A Zero-Trust, Zero-Knowledge, and Zero-Memory Platform for Privacy and yet Secured Access,” IEEE International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems, and Applications (TPS-ISA), 2024. (Accepted and Published, Link)
  6. Sirisha Talapuru Ram Dantu, Shakila Zaman, Vinh Quach, Apurba Pokharel, “Fostering the Metaverse Immersion: Unraveling Personalized Dynamic Human Avatars” IEEE, Metacom, 2024. (Accepted and Published, Link)
  7. Sirisha Talapuru Ram Dantu, Shakila Zaman, Vinh Quach, Apurba Pokharel, “Bringing Life to 3D Human Avatars: Integrating Motion and Texture in Real-Time” ACM Web3D, 2025. (Accepted)
  8. Sirisha Talapuru Ram Dantu, Shakila Zaman, Vinh Quach, Apurba Pokharel, “From Pixels to Presence: High-Quality Rendering of 3D Human Models During Mobility” International Conference on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval (MIPR) 2025. (Accepted)
  9. V. Quach, R. Dantu, S. Talapuru, S. Zaman, A. Pokharel, “ Access Microservices with Zero-Knowledge, Path Certainty and Distributed Traceability,” IEEE International Conference on Service-Oriented System Engineering (SOSE), 2024. (Accepted and Won Best Paper Award)
  10. V. Quach, R. Dantu, S. Talapuru, S. Zaman, A. Pokharel, “ Stateless Decentralized Authentication Using Segmented ZKPs for Microservices Architectures” International Conference on Privacy, Security, and Trust (PST), 2025. (Accepted)
  11. V. Quach, R. Dantu, S. Talapuru, S. Zaman, A. Pokharel, “ Verify All: Establish Bidirectional and Provable Trustworthiness in Microservices Architecture” International Conference on Privacy, Security, and Trust (PST), 2025. (Accepted)

Older Research Work

  1. Crypto Inheritance Planning For HODLers: Methods To Safely Transfer Digital Assets To Beneficiaries. [(Link)]

  2. Comparing Blockchain Bridges: Poly Network vs IBC [Link]