Blockchain Research: Digital Assets and Beyond

Blockchain technology has brought about one of the most exciting and profound technological shifts of our time. It is redefining the way we do commerce, how we interact with government, and how we verify authenticity and provenance of everything from financial assets to food and precious materials.

Bitcoin: Nodes and the Network

Making sense of the nodes and network that maintain the Bitcoin ledger

Speaker: Dr. Owen Vaughan

This talk will give a flavour of the blockchain research conducted outside of academia and in a more commercial setting. Owen Vaughan, Director of Research at nChain, will give an overview of the research department at nChain, and explain how his team is helping to share insights with academic institutions around the world as part of their academic outreach programme.

As part of this talk, Owen will also present on one particular aspect of this research: the structure of the bitcoin network as defined by section 5 of the famous Nakamoto white paper. He will name the different actors, describe their roles, and explore how language has informed and sometimes distorted our understanding of the network.

Owen Vaughan is the Director of Research at nChain. He leads a team of highly-talented individuals who are dedicated to improving our technical and theoretical understanding of blockchain fundamentals, and creating the building blocks that let the technology succeed at scale. His own research centres around graph theory and its applications to the bitcoin network.

Blockchain and Asset Pricing

Speaker: Dr. Qingwei Wang

Blockchain-based cryptoassets are receiving significant attention. With thousands of cryptocurrencies traded and billions of dollars in trading volume every day, we still have only limited understanding of what drives the values of these assets. In this talk, Qingwei Wang, Reader in Finance at Cardiff Business School, will be giving an overview of current research in the pricing of cryptoassets from both fundamental and behavioural perspectives.

Qingwei is the co-director of the Cardiff Fintech Research Group and the director of Centre for China Business Research at Cardiff Business School. His current research interests include behavioural finance, asset pricing and FinTech.

Blockchain in supply chain: popular use cases and toolkit for deployment

Speaker: Dr. Yingli Wang

Thanks to intensive experimentations in various industries as well as increasing efforts from academia, we start to gain increasing understanding of the potential of blockchain to supply chains. However, we are yet to comprehend how blockchain should be implemented in supply chains. As of today, many prototypes have been built but blockchain technology has not yet seen widespread application in supply chains.

In her talk, Dr. Yingli Wang will offer a brief overview of areas where we see blockchain provides value for supply chain, and then introduce a list of critical success factors for its successful deployment. She will also introduce the Blockchain Deployment toolkit developed by World Economic Forum to which she is one of the core contributors.

Dr Yingli Wang is a Reader at Cardiff University in logistics and operations management. She specialises and researches in digital transformation and technological innovations in logistics and supply chains.

Hub for Distributed Technologies & Future Societies: Vision and Demo

Speaker: Dr. Imtiaz Khan

Cardiff Metropolitan University has recently established a multidisciplinary research cluster called Hub for Distributed Technologies & Future Societies that investigates the adaptation and impact of distributed technologies like blockchain on future societies. In this presentation Dr. Khan co-founder of the hub will present a demo on how blockchain can facilitate traceability, transparency and interoperability of data across different government agencies.

Imtiaz Khan is a Reader in data science at Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK. He is an interdisciplinary data scientist with an aim to increase the value and veracity of big data. With PhD from Cardiff University, UK and Postdoc from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, he leads the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at Cardiff Metropolitan University. He is also the founder of Hub for Distributed Technologies and Future Societies at Cardiff Met – a multidisciplinary research hub incorporating academics from four different schools to investigate the adaptation and impact of distributed technologies like blockchain on future societies. Imtiaz is the programme director for the hefcw funded BSc Apprenticeship Data Science programme at Cardiff Met.

This event will highlight some of the research that is conducted at university and industry.