 The Blockchain Technology Lab here at the Informatics Forum at the University of Edinburgh is going to be doing research in the fundamental open questions about the deployment of blockchain technology. And it's going to be focusing on problems related to consensus, the security analysis of the systems, what is exactly the problems they solve, how these protocols can scale, and what is the incentive structure of these protocols. So there is a wide array of interesting questions that the lab is going to be engaged on. We for a very long time were looking for a group of partnerships that we felt could build an intercultural and interdisciplinary research agenda. So we scouted many universities, but the one that was the strongest for us was Edinburgh. You know, it's got a great legacy. You know, we love functional programming and this is one of the birthplaces of Haskell. And the School of Informatics in particular has an extremely diverse and good group of professors and students. It's also going to include people from the School of Law, the School of Social and Political Science, and the School of Design that will enable us to look at the very broad spectrum of research questions related to blockchain systems. This is global technology and frankly this is probably going to end up being the technology that powers the financial stack for the developing world. So as a consequence, you have to be extremely aware of cultural bias and it would be fundamentally unfair to say, oh well, only the western world gets to define how the other part of the world system works. Oroboros is a very different way of solving the consensus problem. It's exactly because it is not based on proof of work and it's based on proof of stake. Mainly it's about being capable of scaling much better than a proof of work based system and being much more energy efficient. So these are the two most important components, especially when you're thinking about a system that would have to be deployed at a global scale and serve people like millions and even hundreds of millions of users. Alright, so thank you everyone for being here for the launch event of the Blockchain Technology Laboratory. So I'm Aguilos Cayas and I'll just start with a little bit the schedule of the day. So first of all there's going to be a presentation about what is the vision of the lab and what are the research objectives that the lab will undertake. There's going to be a short presentation by John, by John Oberlander, about the Bayer Center and the greater vision for the ecosystem, the industry ecosystem in the University of Edinburgh. Then the CEO of IOHK, the company that provides most of the funding for the lab, is going to give a presentation about the vision of IOHK, about industry and academia collaboration, and also the vision of the company for a network of labs that will be interacting and coordinating research in the area of Blockchain Technology. So there's going to be the schedule for the hour, then we're going to move to the social event. There's going to be a short welcome by Johanna Moore, our head of school, and then we're going to be some wine and nibbles, and that's going to be just on mini-forum too. So when I sent the announcement, a number of people came back to me and said they would like to have more information about Blockchain. So why is computer science and the wider IT community excited about Blockchain? Certainly you've heard about the term, and some of you know a lot about it, but I'll come to the question and just be very, very specific. So a Blockchain is a decentralized database of transaction, and that seems quite trite, like why is that important? Why does it matter? For sure, being decentralized or having a database or having transactions is something that in computer science we know how to do very well. These are some of the very important aspects of CS theory and practice for the last 30 years or more. So why does it matter? Why Blockchain became so important and such a buzzword if you weren't, if you weren't in the current media, especially related to IT industry? So digital information is plastic and reproducible. And if you want, this is what makes it so great. So this is what enables so many applications. So the whole information revolution was built around these properties that digital information has. Nevertheless, there is a downside to that which complicates a lot of things. It complicates the debility, complicates provenance, complicates ownership, and complicates culpability. So this is like a double-edged sword that digital information has. And blockchain technology is actually the type of technology that can solve these downsides that digital information has. So that is why blockchain has become so important. So this is the problem if you want in high terms that it tries to address. So let's make it a little bit more clear. And if you want a certain level of abstraction. So the problem to be solved is agreement. So we have to agree on what is the permanent record, for example. What is the history that should be audited? What is that that we can do data mining on so that we can extract useful information? Agreement is key. And of course you can say, if that's my own data, there is nothing to agree on. I have my data and I can mine them and I can make decisions about them. But clearly your data is just a very small fraction of what is out there. And there is clearly much bigger value in actually performing these actions of mining and management at a scale which goes across boundaries of organizations that hold data. So the challenge that will have to agree on what they have to do, they have different incentives about what to agree on. And this is where things get more complicated. Exactly because of this class of incentives between the participants in these systems. So now you can ask, okay, I mean all that is fine and interesting, but is that really new? These are the type of problems that in computer science have been around for a long time. Actually, maybe some of you have heard the term of Byzantine agreement. It's been around since the 80s. What you want is one of these quintessential problems of information systems. Like such a beautiful problem, it's not a math problem, it's like a pure CS problem. A problem which has this elegance of being so easy to state but so hard to solve. It's one of those problems that make computer science beautiful as a science. And it's been around for a long time. So nevertheless, it remained essentially in the theoretical domain. It was this nice interesting theoretical problem that there are these very complicated protocols that solve it, but essentially none of them being implemented. And furthermore, and that's also quite interesting, it was almost exclusively considered in a setting where actors were predetermined and known to each other. And that's like an inherent flaw of this traditional approach of thinking about the problem. Because the actors that are actually engaged to solve the problems, they are themselves a matter of agreement. So there is this circularity issue which somehow is not recognized in if you want the vast literature of decentralized protocols for Byzantine agreement that we know in computer science. So this blockchain type of agreement, like if you want the instance of agreement that blockchain solves was essentially ignored by the CS community till 2009. And that's like quite fascinating, I think, also from a pure science point of view that such a fundamental question was missed from the mainstream CS community, the mainstream CS research community till 2009 when the Bitcoin client was proposed. And the problem was started to gain some traction, but not in theory of computer science cycles, but rather in cycles from developers, hackers that got excited about the Bitcoin system and started to use it. Recognizing that it was actually solving a problem which is quite fundamental but without actually being able to express why it's so fundamental because they lacked the formal training that you would expect to find from someone that is studying distributed systems. So in a nutshell, why blockchain works? So now if you want, you can structure the history. You can take this like very simple picture and say history is structured as a blockchain. The left is the oldest blocks and the most recent is the latest blocks. And decentralization has this negative outcome that there are many alternative histories, many alternative blockchains that coexist and might be pursued by different parts of the system as the system evolves in a decentralized fashion. Nevertheless, the protocol that implements a blockchain imposes a change selection rule that together with certain cryptographic components that the protocol has makes it economically infeasible for a splinter coalition to revert history to an alternate, preferable chain. So this is the fundamental technique, if you want, the fundamental method that is behind these protocols and why they work. So this gives you like a glimpse of what is this domain and why these questions are interesting for a pure computer science point of view. So now we can go a little bit to what happened afterwards. So in 2009, as I mentioned, Bitcoin emerged and gave this paradigm of solving this blockchain consensus and after that there were many other systems that were proposed and explored alternatives if you want modes of being decentralized. Right now, together with Bitcoin, which you see on the right, there's a lot of other systems and organizations that are exploring this space. And there are many different ways that people have tried to map this terrain, like a common one that maybe some of you have seen is like this distinction between permission and permissionless type of consensus systems. And I should say both of them are here to play a role in the way that this technology emerges and evolves. So, okay, that might be interesting. Let's say from a CS point of view, from an informatics perspective, these are interesting points perhaps to be made and possibly there are some good number of papers to write in the conferences that we that we do research and computer science like to submit papers to. But what about applications? Why are these protocols really matter if they matter at all in the real world? So actually, this is the part that has been actually the one that gained the most traction first. It was not the research conference in computer science that embraced this new technology. It was actually an industry, a young industry, if you want a portion of the IT industry that enthusiastically embraced the idea of exploring this technology. And starting with Bitcoin, which obviously is a digital currency, as the main application if you want of this technology for starters, there is a wide array of other applications that have been, that people started to explore in that space. And I'll just name record keeping, which has to do with healthcare records, land ownership, intellectual property, securities management, and digital rights management, smart contracts. There's all these things that maybe some of you have heard about them that are associated with possible applications to blockchain systems. There is actually by different measures, perhaps even much more than a one billion venture capital investment in various companies that are doing all kinds of different things related to blockchain systems. So I'll just give you some small examples, like digital security trading. How do you prove ownership and manage digital securities? Digital identity. How do you manage digital identities? And how can you do that while protecting consumer privacy? How do you actually manage corporations? How do you record the deeds like transfer of equity, ownership, governance? How do you manage patient records across health organizations? All these are just a few examples of applications that are actually having companies pursuing them and raising venture capital using blockchain systems as their main technology advantage compared to their competition. So this gives you a little bit the perspective from why we're interested in understanding this technology and engage with the information technology industry to pursue it further and understand it. So I'll take a few slides to give you a little bit a perspective from what is the scientist's view of this system. So the Bitcoin protocol is a starting point on trying to understand these systems and has been hailed by many as a remarkable solution. But as I'd like to add to this, what is the problem that it solves and under what assumptions? So just to give you a little bit of the science flavor that you can apply when you try to tackle such questions, I'm just going to give you a little bit of perspective. What does it really mean for someone that wants to build a secure system? What is the process? How do we build secure systems today following a rigorous discipline within computer science? So we start with an objective which we have to understand and given that objective, we can have things of resources that can be utilized to solve it and then think of these resources in the context of a threat model that describes what we think can go wrong about our solution that tries to solve that objective. Given that, we can have a candidate solution that we can analyze and under certain set of assumptions we can formally argue that it is secure and meets the objective in the given threat model assuming the parties have the resources that we have assumed they have. Once we have this, then we can come back and ask are these resources indeed available to the parties? Is the threat model realistic? Are these assumptions plausible? Usually when we have security breakdowns is exactly because we have failed in this process to reflect the real world and the answer to these questions turns out to be negative and does not describe the actual deployment. Even when we have answered all these questions, we can come to this final one if you want which in some sense it's final in this and in another it's the beginning of thinking about the design space of alternative solutions that can actually also meet the same objective. So cryptography and computer security research has been extremely successful in basically using this model of thinking and for providing solutions to the basic objectives that we need to solve to make secure systems. I'll just give you a little bit and I'm not going to go into the details of the objective of a secure channel. How do two parties send a message securely to each other? You can actually fit perfectly all the research that took place in computer science in the last almost 40 years in this diagram and think of this as a process going from 76 the Diffie-Hellman protocol to the first actually robust implementation of TLS the protocol that all of us use every day to connect to our email, to connect to Facebook, to connect to Twitter. It is the protocol that we use every day for everything we do on the internet. And this is something like the process, the analysis process of this protocol which just solves this relatively simple problem which took like all these years with finally just three years ago a proof that the actual implementation that we have is secure under a reasonable threat model. Imagine like from 76 the Diffie-Hellman protocol to 2014 for a complete proof that the actual implementation that we use and not a paper and pencil protocol is actually secure. So if you take Bitcoin and you put it in this diagram it's interesting to say that what we start with is not an objective but actually the solution. And this is actually what happened. In 2009 we had the solution. And now we try to understand what is the objective and if actually the resources are indeed the ones that were theorized what is the threat model, there are things like hashing power which is maybe some of you have heard about the objective which is a reliable record of transactions, some assumptions about collision resistance hash functions maybe some of you know these terms and eventually an elusive security proof we're still in the process of trying to take Bitcoin and blockchain protocols and fit them in this if you want the proper rigorous way of designing and analyzing secure systems. So if you want this is the fundamental question that propels if you want the research work for the blockchain technology lab. But I'll make it wider and precise. So if you want that's the mission of the lab, explore the fundamental open questions regarding the deployment of blockchain technology and security of these protocols is the core fundamental question. But of course it's not the only one and I'll come to that but in performance being the other ones the other one together with security has to be done the analysis has to be done following a rigorous discipline the one that we have developed and evolved within computer science and finally making all these results publicly available in the sense that software is going to be open source papers we're going to be in Creative Commons so that the whole area benefits and grows as a whole and just now in the next final few minutes about the way the research of the lab is going to be laid out I'll just give you a little bit of the structure of the lab and just describe briefly some of the questions we'll tackle. So there's going to be approximately 10 people that are going to be engaged in the lab in its beginning most of the funding of the lab comes from IOHK the company that also will join us today in the presentation so there is postdoctoral researchers and PhD students that are going to be engaged in the lab and I'm also very happy to say that there is a lot of other faculty that have expressed to me a lot of enthusiasm about engaging with the lab also coming from areas which are outside informatics and actually outside if you want the core CS topics that I was describing in the beginning and we have like the School of Law, the School of Social and Political Science and the School of Design here at the University of Edinburgh that we're very excited to be affiliated and collaborate with us in this effort furthermore there's going to be the lab is part of a wider strategy of the company IOHK to fund research for a fast cycle between academia and industry in conducting industry inspired research and there is collaborations with the Tokyo Institute of Technology which already launched last month the National Capital Design University of Athens, the Oxford University, the University of Maryland and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign these latter three are planned for the future and IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson which we are very happy to have him here today will be going on later in his presentation to describe more about the vision of the company about that so the lab here at Edinburgh is going to be the headquarters if you want of this operation and is going to provide the leadership that from a science point of view for all these coordinated research efforts which will try to cover all the different perspectives of the blockchain domain which even though in my presentation today I gave it an angle that is suitable for informatics because that's exactly where we are based you got a few hints and some understanding that solving blockchain problems and solving if you want the problems that the blockchain technology will try to tackle is a research question which is much wider than strictly informatics so location of the lab is the Appledon Tower in the 8th floor with the option to move to the Bayes Center in 2018 and that's actually part of a response for belonging to this wider ecosystem for research and industry collaboration that I'll be happy to have Joan presenting immediately after me and give you a little bit perspective of in a more wide sense what the University of Edinburgh is doing for engaging with the industry especially with the Bayes Center which is due to open in 2018 the immediate research themes of the lab if you want to have this as just final words or final titles is studying scalability and efficiency of blockchain systems which is arguably right now what is recognized by the industry as the most important research question the most important open research question related to blockchain systems and with this it comes another fundamental question which is reconciling utility and privacy in blockchain systems so somehow blockchain systems have been hailed as an extremely powerful technology because they give you access to transactions and if you want data that are available from many different sources but of course you understand that this also raises very serious privacy concerns and reconciling these issues between privacy and utilities is one of other very fundamental questions that we're going to tackle which segue is actually to the third issue which is how to turn essentially blockchain to a platform a service which if you want is a large decentralized computer system that has the data the software and the set of actions that are legal on the data and can enable data processing at a global scale in a way which is compliant with whatever rules the data are associated with when they're processed and finally if you want to glue all that is understand the incentive structure behind these protocols because it's impossible to think of them in classical security terms where they're good guys and bad guys the global nature of these protocols call for a if you want a rational type of actor approach which recognizes the fact that the entities engaged in these systems they're not necessarily good or bad but they're all rational actors that are engaged with the objective of extracting the maximum utility they can so this gave a big overview of what the blockchain technology lab is about I'm going to stop here and I'll ask to the floor Professor John Oberlander who in his capacity as a system principle of data technology that will give a presentation about the vision of the University of Edinburgh especially focusing on data technology and transfer as Agilos said the university is developing extensive plans around data technology and the data driven innovation agenda more broadly in case you don't recognize that it's behind you and you'll have a chance to stare at it from the roof terrace in a few minutes time that's how it looked this morning and that's the state of construction of the new base centre for data science and technology so in terms of the broader ecosystem there is growing interest in the area of data driven innovation in the city of Edinburgh and this is really thinking about the ways in which we use ubiquitous data to shape, develop and deliver innovative products, innovative processes including digital services and products to citizens and consumers alike and so in developing that data driven innovation ecosystem the university is establishing three institutes, three data driven innovation hubs so the one I'm going to talk about specifically is the base centre named in honour of the Reverend Thomas Bays, an alumnus of this university who lived from 1701 roughly to 1762 there is the Usher Institute which is aligned with the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine and there's also what's now being termed the Edinburgh Futures Institute on the old Royal Infirmary site at Quaternwile now the one that's actually currently under construction is the base centre and it provides if you like a lot of the core technologies around data science and its applications and blockchain is an excellent example of that each of those university entities is aligned with the College as you can see and each of them also provides a home for some national enterprises so the Usher Institute will provide a home for FAR, UK activity and also the Minister of Data Research Centre the Bays provides a home for the Alan Turing Institute in Edinburgh along with the Data Lab which is the Scottish Funding Council's Innovation Centre for Data Science and also the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences so that's a non-existent building as yet that's the new building for the Usher Institute up at the new Royal Infirmary site and a big focus there is around patient records and extracting value from information captured in the National Health Service and exploring that in ways which respect privacy, security and trust and then this as yet ghostly building is the old Royal Infirmary as it's going to be reconstructed when it provides a home for the new Edinburgh Futures Institute and there are three main strands of activity there around creative technologies, financial technologies and also public sector technologies and in terms of places where there are applications for blockchain technologies you can appreciate that there are going to be significant applications in quarter-mile for them and then just to say a few words about the Bays Centre specifically we think of data science, data as being the heart of the matter but really also if you like just the filling in the centre of the sandwich so we have a much broader view I think of data science than some obviously privacy, security and trust are critical around the data piece but we're looking at the systems which provide the specialised architectures for dealing with large amounts of data and also the systems that generate huge amounts of data such as the Internet of Things and on the other side how do we actually interact with the data so we're thinking there very much around the sensors and effectors that come to us through robotics but also the speech and language technologies that are built on the foundations of natural language processing so data is at the heart of it but we're looking at the whole stack when we look at it in Edinburgh context so for the Bays Centre the focus is looking at around the interactions between people and data and systems and looking at ways in which we can link together research and teaching and innovation in novel configurations and so to that end this big blob represents roughly 600 people who will be sitting in the new building when it is at its capacity and around about half of those are involved in knowledge exchange in some capacity 150 seats are set aside for people coming to us from corporate research and development teams like IOHK and in addition to that around about 150 people are involved in knowledge transfer from the university site in some shape or form but clearly research is at the heart of it and education which includes both PhD, doctoral training centres but also includes masters programmes of various stripes so just to skip through this there are roughly four main schools represented here so the School of Design through our collaborative programme in design informatics will be coming onto the site informatics particularly represented through robotics because there's going to be major new labs available in the new building on the ground on the first floor for robotics research but that's not all clearly because data science is critical as well and so the Alan Turing Institute will find its home in the new building and there are teams already associated with the Alan Turing Institute in this building who will move over in due course such as the researchers associated with the Intel partnership and then the next school in mathematics represented through ICMS which is all about week-long intensive meetings for international status mathematicians but in addition there's the Maxwell Institute which is the doctoral training centre for analytics and communications joint with Harriet Watt and then there's also a little bit of engineering in the building so the ground floor of the building is going to have set up for visible light communication experiments run by the LIFI Research and Development Centre led by Harold Haas and his colleagues other teams coming on board as well as those schools involve Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre led by Mark Parsons these things are not coming because they're big large amounts of energy and live out south of the university in Midlothian but the other team that's joining us is the Data Lab, that's the Scottish Funding Council's Innovation Centre for Data Science and I'm pleased to say also on the same floor as Data Lab will be finding a new home for colleagues in informatics involved in commercialization in its various shapes and forms so to be more specific this is a visualization of what the new building will look like if you have spent time in this building we'll think it looks remarkably familiar although maybe just a little bit scarier with this hanging staircase across the middle this perspective is looking west, you're on the third floor and the whole of this third floor is set aside for corporate R&D teams we're looking to have teams of between 5 and 15 from different groups and they will be immersed in this environment for research and teaching and innovation and we're looking there to build on existing relationships and bring them to the next stage and we're delighted to have IOHK as one of the partners who we hope to see on the third floor of the base when it opens in I say this slightly loosely spring of 2018 by which I mean roughly the first of June and that's the, at least before my birthday so that's the key thing so that's the 16th of June and I won't buy everybody here a drink so it doesn't happen but we'll consider it so this is the third floor but it's a mixture of larger offices and smaller offices and a certain amount of open plan and lots of breakout spaces and it connects into this building and also into the neighbouring Doogled Stewart building so that's the architect's visualisation of the structure of the building from the ground floor up you'll see it's a little bit different from this building quite small at the base but it opens up and gets lighter as you go on up the building and that's what it looked like roughly in July of last year so it continued to look like that for a very long time and then quite recently it started looking like that so actually this is a new game I've discovered which is doing right and it's quite satisfying to see how much it's leaping up in the last few weeks and that's perspective from the east camera and we're very grateful to Bob Fisher and his colleagues for capturing the whole of the process in glorious colour so that's what it will look like allegedly when it's completed and I think the key thing for the current meeting is to emphasise two things first of all it's very much around the fundamental research which powers data driven innovation and blockchain is an excellent example of that but also it's about nurturing new partnerships and the relationship with IOHK is an excellent example of that so Charles over to you Well thank you all for coming I do appreciate it I'm Charles Hoskinson the Chief Executive Officer of IOHK I'm willing to wager it's a company that very few of you have heard of before today fair assessment so what are we? Well we're a blockchain company we build blockchains so we have both an engineering and a research division so on the engineering side we focus on functional programming so we're high school programmers and we like doing high assurance software developments so we think a lot about formal verification and theorem provers and these types of things and on the research side we worry about the science of cryptocurrencies so it's not sufficiently good just to say go implement proof of work or some proof of stake scheme we're really obsessed with the is it right? kind of deal so early in our company's history we decided that we needed to hire dedicated researchers so we did what all companies do we just started hiring PhDs in cryptography we built up a kind of a nice little brain trust and they said you know it would be really nice if we had some university partnerships and then we said okay well where do we go you know who should we talk to I'm Dr. Steve Boulder and I talked to a lot of other institutions and we went to the usual suspects like MIT and Stanford and Carnegie Mellon and so forth and we just couldn't find a right cultural fit for the university partner we were looking for a university that was really committed to innovation that wasn't resting on its laurels that wanted to push hard the funding was right the government participation was right the professors were hungry and young a lot of graduate students were hungry and so upon that survey looking around, Edinburgh actually ended up being the choice for us but we want to go beyond that we actually want to do intercultural and interdisciplinary research and so we playing with my website there we go okay so we wanted to do intercultural and interdisciplinary research and so it was important to us not just to have one research center we actually decided to fund several centers we put some money into Tokyo Tech for example and later on we're going to be expanding into Greece and we'll have US partnerships as well and our hope is to have representation all throughout the world why is that? well because my company has a mission we want to provide financial services for the 3 billion people who don't have them and we feel that blockchain technology in particular is the best way of doing that we feel that it gives us a collection of technologies that allows us in a very fundamental way to deal with reputation and identity and to actually have fair settlement and to do it in a way that is open and doesn't actually cost a lot there's a reason why there's not a financial system that's really good in places like Vietnam and Cambodia and all throughout Africa it's not because banks are evil racist institutions it's because it simply costs too much money to deploy the existing financial stack we have with its regulations into those markets your value per customer is lower than the cost per customer so the technology that we're building here that our company works on we feel we can put it into a cell phone at some point and make it basically free or near free to access for everybody in the world and that means everybody in the world has the same financial system regardless of where they come from it also means that we can open up a debate about what is good money that's a very exciting thing for me I'm kind of an Austrian economist and this whole notion of saying that well if your local currency isn't so good you actually can have private currencies that are just as stable and just as useful as any other that's a very exciting prospect and it's something that we now have an opportunity to innovate on not being at the Federal Reserve not being at the Bank of England as academics and as engineers and as entrepreneurs so thank you all for coming I do appreciate it this is just the beginning it's a long road ahead we have a lot of people to hire a lot of work to do a lot of papers to write a lot of peer review to endure and it's going to be a fun journey my final point and the closing point is that this research is not just computer science research you guys have a phenomenal facility but we're not going to get anywhere if we just think about this as mathematicians and computer scientists and we have elegant theorems and we say ah it's provably secure and it's implementable and it's efficient there is a social component to this there is a legal component to this there is a societal component to this the systems have to be useful there is so many cases in the last 40 years of people building great products and coming up with great ideas that no one ever actually ended up using because they either weren't useful or consumers for whatever reason just to adopt them so one of the earliest discussions we had with Agalos in planning this laboratory was we need to make accommodations for those people the lawyers the scientists and the others and I'm extremely proud to see Robin Williams and other people you notice he was on the slide I had to go for that I'm extremely proud to see people like that collaborating and my hope is that people from this institution can from not just the computer science department but the other departments can work together in this respect and also travel to our other satellites like Tokyo Tech and the satellites so we have intercultural research as well so thank you all for coming there's going to be a reception here in a little bit I'll be available for questions or comments and have some fun cheers