November 2018 Activities Newsletter
In this edition we give you a roundup of news from the CBT and our Fellows, and look ahead to events coming up in December and early 2019.
Look out for our next research newsletter toward the middle of December.
News from the CBT:
IEEE Computer Magazine Editorial Recognition – Prof. Philip Treleaven, Director of the UK Centre for Financial Computing, and Dr. Paolo Tasca, the CBT’s Executive Director, were recognized for their amazing editorial work on the IEEE’s Computer Magazine. The magazine’s September 2017 issue on Blockchain Technology and Finance won the 2018 Folio: Eddie Award as a result of their work.
In the words of Sumi Helal, Computer’s Editor-in-Chief: “Philip Treleaven, University College London, and his guest editor colleagues have done an outstanding job putting this special issue together, showing our readership how the financial services sector swiftly overcame the Bitcoin challenges to focus on many promising advantages that the Blockchain technology can bring about in that sector.” For more details, see here.
The BARAC project held another very successful meeting on 16 November on the topic of distributed ledger technology and regulation – Crypto-asset and Financial Regulation, Money Laundering using cryptocurrencies, Private Electronic Payments and Co-development Initiatives in DLT.
The BARAC project investigates the technical, legal and managerial aspects of DLT in the services industry, including the significance of new business models and their effects on industry structures.
CBT fellow Navroop Sahdev was named among the top 47 global “Subject Matter Experts Driving Innovation” in Blockchain.
Along with the biggest names across industries, Navroop has recently been named #28 among the 47 top subject matter experts on blockchain technology by HowDo.com.
Navroop is a Fellow at MIT Connection Science and holds a host of leadership roles in the Distributed Ledger Technology space, both as a practitioner as well as a researcher. An economist by training, Navroop leads the R&D agenda as the Head of Economic Strategy in her current role. She is also a Research Associate at the Centre for Blockchain Technologies (CBT) at University College London and holds three masters degrees in IP Management, Economics of Innovation and Applied Economics.
A United Nations Youth Delegate for 2017, Navroop has co-authored Hyperledger’s Blockchain for Business online course. She speaks regularly at FinTech and blockchain conferences and currently serves on the advisory board of a host of blockchain companies, across industries. Previously, she has worked at Harvard University and United Nations Environment Programme. Her research interests are focused on Distributed Ledger Technologies, Game Theory, Networks Theory and Complex Systems Science.
Upcoming CBT events:
Hard Fork: Decentralized Finance – On 13 December the CBT will be hosting its monthly research seminar in partnership with TNW as part of the Hard Fork Decentralized festival. Please stay tuned for free tickets to this seminar being released soon.
The 3rd Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts will be held on 22 February 2019 in association with Financial Cryptography. This will be the third in a series of very successful workshops in which we focus on the programmability of blockchains with talks by very interesting speakers. For more details on the submission schedule and (two) deadlines visit this link, or contact CBT affiliate Andrea Bracciali.
And finally:
Advancing Bitcoin (7-8 February 2019) is a conference where developers meet to learn, discuss, and be inspired by the latest technical developments in the Bitcoin ecosystem. There will be talks, workshops, and panel discussions focusing on Lightning, privacy, and security. Get 20% off the Early Bird (£349) tickets and standard priced tickets whilst they last.
As a bonus, we are giving a CBT follower the chance to attend this conference for free! To win this free ticket, write a haiku about Bitcoin and send it to us at blockchain@cs.ucl.ac.uk by the 7th of December. The winning entry will make it onto our twitter page!