Permissioned Blockchains and Databases

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                        Joint Seminar
Big Data Institute and Department of Computer Science & Engineering
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Speaker:        Dr. C. Mohan
                IBM Fellow and Former IBM India Chief Scientist
                IBM Almaden Research Center

Title:          "Permissioned Blockchains and Databases"

Date:           Friday, 7 April 2017

Time:           2:00pm - 3:00pm

Venue:          IAS Lecture Theatre, Lo Ka Chung Building, HKUST

Abstract:

Blockchain (distributed ledger), the underlying technology of Bitcoin, has
become very popular for use in commercial or permissioned environments.
Computer companies like IBM and Microsoft, and many key players in
different vertical industry segments have recognized the applicability of
blockchains in environments other than cryptocurrencies. IBM did some
pioneering work by architecting and implementing Fabric, and then open
sourcing it. Now Fabric is being enhanced via the Hyperledger Consortium
as part of the Linux Foundation. While there is no standard in the
blockchain space currently, all the ongoing efforts involve some
combination of database, transaction, encryption, consensus and other
distributed systems technologies. Dr. Mohan will focus on how the
functionality of traditional and modern data stores are being utilized or
not utilized in the different blockchain projects. Since most of the
blockchain efforts are still in a nascent state, he believes the time is
right for database researchers and practitioners to get more deeply
involved.


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Biography:

Dr. C. Mohan has been an IBM researcher for 35 years in the database area,
impacting both IBM and non-IBM products, the research and academic
communities, and standards, especially with his invention of the ARIES
family of database locking and recovery algorithms, and the Presumed Abort
commit protocol. This IBM (1997) and ACM/IEEE (2002) Fellow, served as the
IBM India Chief Scientist from 2006-2009, and received the ACM SIGMOD
Innovation Award (1996), the VLDB 10 Year Best Paper Award (1999) and
numerous IBM awards. He was elected to the US and Indian National
Academies of Engineering (2009), named an IBM Master Inventor (1997),
Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Madras (1977), and Distinguished Visiting
Professor at China's Tsinghua University (2016). He is an inventor of 47
patents, and is currently focused on Big Data, HTAP and Blockchain
technologies. He has served on the advisory board of IEEE Spectrum, among
other conference and journal boards. Dr. Mohan is a frequent speaker in
North America, Europe and India, and has given talks in 40 countries. He
is very active on social media with a huge network of followers.