Winter School on Blockchain
November 25 – 27, 2019
Speakers | Registration | Program* | Venue | Contact
List of Talks
- Cryptographic Tools Used in Blockchain
Manoj Prabhakaran, IIT Bombay
In this talk, we shall cover the basics of some of the cryptographic tools — like hash functions, digital signatures and zero-knowledge proofs — that have been used in designing blockchains. The talk will assume no prior background on the topic and would be introductory in nature. - When Blockchains Meet Databases
S. Sudarshan, IIT Bombay
In this talk, we will discuss some connections between blockchains and databases. One part of the talk will be about how a database can ensure that transactions follow a serialization order specified by a blockchain while getting higher performance by allowing concurrent transaction execution. Such schemes are also important for the deterministic database approach which has been used for database replication. The second part of the talk will focus on how the above approach can be used to protect a database system from insider attacks, but executing all transactions through a blockchain, and having independently managed databases (with no common point of insider attack) run the same transactions in parallel. - Future of DLTs
Richard Brown, R3
DLTs have evolved over a very short course of time from being a mechanism to enable distributed computing to decentralizing power from a few too many. But sometimes we should stop to remind ourselves what problem we’re actually trying to solve. Richard G Brown, CTO of R3, would share his thoughts on the business possibilities now being enabled by enterprise blockchain and DLT – and the emerging trends that could result in the next generation of DLT. - Engineering Research Opportunities for Blockchain-Based Systems
Mark Staples, Data61 CSIRO
Blockchain-based systems are complex and increasingly trusted systems, becoming used in application areas where dependability is required. Are these systems trustworthy? Drawing on a framework in the philosophy of engineering, I sketch a landscape of research opportunities for evidence that can support design and assurances about blockchain-based systems. Examples in this landscape will be provided using previous blockchain research from Data61. -
Making Money Smart: Exploring blockchain for government-funded conditional payments
Mark Staples, Data61 CSIRO
This talk describes a collaborative research project between CSIRO’s Data61 and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, exploring how can ‘smart money’ better enables conditional payments. Smart money, or programmable money, is money that can be programmed to be spent only when certain conditions are met and remember how it has been spent. As smart money is designed not to be misspent, it can reduce friction and enable funders to empower spenders in conditional payment environments. For example, it can reduce the need for funders to assess payments after-the-fact when checking for compliance with spending rules. In addition, as smart money remembers how it has been spent, this can assist with budget management for spenders and payments reconciliation for businesses. Conditional payment environments can range from public policy programs to insurance payouts, to corporate and organization delegations, to the management of trusts and charities, and even to the spending conditions, individuals place on themselves, such as savings plans. Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is a conditional payment environment; providing funding to people with disabilities, called participants, to spend on disability support services. Funds are spent in accordance with the rules set for each participant’s individual plan. We developed a smart money proof of concept and tested it in a laboratory setting with participants and carers in the NDIS. A blockchain component used tokens to represent promises to pay in Australian Dollars, smart contracts to create spending conditions based on NDIS plan rules, and registries to represent parts of the payment environment such as lists of eligible service providers for particular services. Out laboratory testing explored whether smart money can assist with challenges in the NDIS and be useable by participants. - Trust in the food supply chain
Raj Gaire, Data61 CSIRO
Food is essential to not only our life but also to the economy in today’s world. From time to time, especially after the outbreak of foodborne diseases, trust in food supply chains comes under immense public scrutiny. Blockchain is considered as an obvious choice of technology to tackle the trust problem. In this talk, I will present highlights and learnings from our research on trust in food supply chains and demonstrate that Blockchain may be necessary but certainly not sufficient to improve trust in the food supply chains. - Challenges in building decentralized System: A practitioner’s perspective
Dilip Saha, BOSCH
We believe Blockchain/Distributed ledger technology will disrupt several industries beyond Cryptocurrency. We are working on to solve some of these core business problems in the area of Sustainable Society, Machine Economy and Decentralized Platforms. In terms of technology, we believe most of the business problems will be solved at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and IoT. The talk will cover case studies of complex use cases; we are currently trying to solve using Distributed Ledger technology. The talk will also bring out the top three technical challenges for building decentralized systems. These top three points will explain the challenges faced by the enterprise during the software engineering lifecycle. We wish to welcome the community of researchers and developers to contribute to these demanding areas to accelerate the adoption of DLT in Enterprises beyond the crypto space. - Blockchain: A Practitioner’s view on Adoption, Challenges, and Sustainability in Financial Services
Annamalai Anbukkarasu, TCS
Blockchain promises to offer a world of new opportunities to financial institutions, with benefits such as transparency, enhanced security, reduced costs, and increased efficiency and speed. As a result of these considerable structural advantages, blockchain technology is expected to have a significant impact on industries including payments, finance, insurance, energy, IoT, exchanges, music et al. Having said this, none of the financial industry’s initiatives have been rolled out at scale; though it is slowly moving towards mainstream adoption. The technology is still evolving coupled with regulatory standards. In this talk, we are intending to cover those aspects, giving our view on blockchain’s adoption in today’s Financial Services segment, the kind of platforms which are being widely accepted/polarized and why? We shall also discuss the challenges perceived by practitioners (or Consumer of Blockchain capabilities). - Incentives in Blockchain
Sarthak Gaurav, IIT Bombay
Incentives are central to the economics of blockchain but not much is known about how to think about incentives in the design of blockchain platforms. In this lecture, we will examine how the very incentive structures that solve specific problems through blockchain may create serious problems. By focusing on Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) and monetary and non-monetary incentives, we will develop a case for carrots and sticks in blockchain implementation. This lecture will offer insights from game theory and contract theory to motivate technological innovations and smarter management practices that may improve the design of incentives in the blockchain. - DAML: Making Contracts Smart and Portable
Vivek Srivastava, Digital Asset
The talk will start with a brief history of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (“DLT”), the problems these platforms aim to solve, and an overview of the core features of a DLT platform. Then we will look at the role of a programming language in the DLT platform. Next, we will explore DAML — an open-source ledger agnostic language purpose-built for the exchange of value-and how DAML models, tracks, and enforces smart contract rights and obligations; how it helps preserve the confidentiality of sensitive contractual information stored on various ledgers; it provides an immutable evidentiary audit trail of DLT contract execution. Lastly, we will cover some DAML code, the DAML SDK, and how one can get access to DAML and start the DAML journey. - Robust Programming of Smart Contracts using Solidity+
RK Shyamasundar, IIT Bombay
There has been a significant amount of work done in analyzing the correctness of smart contracts. Some of the major deficiencies of these explorations are (1) analysis is based on the bytecode generated for Ethereum rather than smart contracts in Solidity, (ii) analysis is approximate and have severe limitations in usage due to over-/ or under-approximation. In this talk, we want to address the following question: “Using a stark resemblance of Solidity programs with distributed programs, can we arrive at a concurrent programming language approach of arriving at simple specifications of Solidity programs similar to classical declarations used in concurrent programming languages that leads to robust programming of smart contracts?” - Overview of Current Blockchain Platforms and their Characteristics
NV Narendra Kumar, IDRBT
The notion of “Blockchain technology” has a variety of interpretations, thus, leading to a plethora of protocols. This makes their analysis and/or comparison a mammoth task. This talk attempts to make the above problem more manageable by identifying the essential characteristics of Blockchain technology. The benefits of this approach are illustrated by describing some prominent protocols and comparing them using these characteristics. - Design Considerations and Inherent Constraints for Blockchain Platforms
NV Narendra Kumar, IDRBT
There are several parameters that impact the design of a blockchain platform. It turns out that these parameters are not independent of one another, but are intricately interconnected. This naturally leads to inherent constraints that force the designers to trade-off some desirable features for others. This talk attempts to highlight some of these aspects, and argue why we may never have “the best blockchain platform” but rather have many incomparable blockchain platforms each with their own benefits and suitable applications. - DLT Enabled Trust and Assurance Framework
Vallipuram Muthukkumarasamy, Griffith University
In the digital transformation era, organizations and industries heavily rely on near real-time data from IoT devices, sensors, social media, and other sources to make optimal decisions related to operational matters or strategic implementation. The analytics, modeling, and prediction tools are well advanced exploiting AI, big data and other technologies. However, they mostly operate on an inherent assumption that the raw data need not be questioned. Due to a number of factors, such as instrument malfunction, aging, hostile attack, built-in uncertainty, etc, the decisions can significantly impact the overall outcomes. The DLT enabled framework is investigated to associate appropriate confidence levels to various data sources and to validate the integrity of the data. A case study will be discussed in the presentation. - Self-Sovereign Identity—The Future of Identity and Credentialing
Pandurang Kamat, Persistent Systems
Secure digital identity is central to our digital, connected life today. The cost of acquiring, managing, proving and securing identities runs into billions of dollars globally. As high-profile data breaches have shown, centralized identity providers become attractive targets for hackers. In this talk, we will understand how the identity ecosystem can be made more secure, more efficient and less expensive using self-sovereign, decentralized identities anchored on blockchains. More importantly, how individuals can have more control over their identity attributes using decentralized design. We will learn about the emerging decentralized identity standard and how this work can enable broader credentialing use cases. - Decentralized Identity and securing Trustware
Vinod Panicker, Wipro
The majority of trust ware for decentralized Identity solutions are built on top of existing open-source. They are dependent on multiple open source components. In this talk, I will introduce the concept of Decentralized Identity, verifiable Credentials and how they can be leveraged for securing open-source trustware. - Building an Internet of Value
Vidya Nair, Ripple
The traditional way of doing Global payments will soon run out of fashion! They’re slow, expensive and unreliable. This lecture discusses how Ripple using its blockchain-based settlement solution is shaking these old pillars by creating an ‘Internet of Value’ – where money moves as easily as information does. We will also explore how Ripple’s payment network ‘RippleNet’ is achieving this by making global payments faster and more accessible than ever before by using digital assets for on-demand liquidity.