Blockchain Research: Real World Use Cases

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.

The Blockchain Research events on this day will highlight blockchain research that is conducted at university and industry. The focus in this session will be on research that has evolved from real world applications, around tracing of physical assets.

This event features a series of talks from academic and industry leaders:

• Swansea Blockchain Lab - Ambition, Opportunities, Research Results
• Arnold Beckmann, Professor of Computer Science, Swansea University
• Secure Asset Data Systems driven by Blockchain
• Alex Milne, Blockchain Researcher, Swansea University
• Asset Identity Provenance on Blockchain
• Thane Hall, Digital Trust Product Line Manager and Solution Architect, Thales UK

In these talks, we'll be learning more about the challenges and opportunities related to blockchain research, in particular in relation to tracing and tracking of physical assets. We will also demonstrate a prototype system for tracing physical assets based on blockchain technology.

After the talks, the speakers will take part in a Q&A panel session, where the audience will be invited to submit questions to the talks or to the wider topic of 'blockchain research'.

We hope that this will stimulate a discussion between our speakers on the opportunities for engaging in blockchain research.

More detailed descriptions of the talks are given below.

Swansea Blockchain Lab - Ambition, Opportunities, Research Results

Speaker: Arnold Beckmann

​Swansea Blockchain Lab (http://www.swanseablockchainlab.com/​) is a dedicated research group based at Swansea University's Computational Foundry (https://www.swansea.ac.uk/science/computationalfoundry/​), and supported by the CHERISH Digital Economy Research Centre (https://www.swansea.ac.uk/science/cherish-de/​). The Lab is a dedicated group of researchers and business professionals based at Swansea University's Computational Foundry, with combinative expertise across computational science and mathematics. Its mission is to understand the fundamental scientific underpinnings of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies; to drive engagement with industry and the wider blockchain community; to promote a culture of shared knowledge and co-creation of blockchain research and development; and to work collaboratively with our partners to develop transformative innovations that address societal and economic challenges across government, industry and third sector.

In this talk we will give an overview of ​Swansea Blockchain Lab and highlight some of the research that has been done by its members. We will also present some of the projects that have been done or are currently in progress at ​Swansea Blockchain Lab.

Secure Asset Data Systems using Blockchain

Speaker: Alex Milne

We discuss results of an investigation into how blockchain can be used to facilitate the emerging future paradigm where asset ownership is decreased and replaced with a more environmentally friendly and economical methodology of monetisation. We discuss deep leasing as an idea, and design and implementation of a prototype solution that allows for this to become a reality without the need for trusted third parties. The talk will include a demonstration of the prototype we have obtained including the blockchain technology that is driving the system.

Speaker: Thane Hall

Blockchains are excellent for storing data immutably for multi stakeholder applications, however within one of their key use cases, supply chain and asset tracking, provenance in the data domain is undermined if there's no trusted link between an assets physical and digital identity with its records on the Blockchain. Thales has been looking at this problem and in this talk will identify ways in which this connection can be strengthened.