Join us for a public lecture by Professor Aggelos Kiayias (chair in Cyber Security and Privacy and director of the Blockchain Technology Laboratory, University of Edinburgh) on the topic of Distributed Ledger Technologies, blockchains and cryptocurrencies.

With the introduction of the blockchain protocol a little more than a decade ago a new breed of information technology (IT) came to existence. One that is able to scale globally in a bottom up fashion via the incentive driven and protocol mediated collaboration of individual node operators. This type of technology motivated rethinking from first principles the current state of IT and how established paradigms in various IT supported domains such as finance, media, supply chain, government and others could benefit from it. In this talk, Professor Aggelos Kiayias will review the advantages as well as the challenges in harnessing this technology and also point to directions for future research and development.

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This is an in-person event as part of the Scotland Fintech Festival 2022. Hosted by the FinTech and Financial Services Research Cluster at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and Edinburgh Innovations.

15.30 – 16.00   Arrival and registration

16.00 – 16.10   Introduction by the Chair: Dr Jordana Viotto Da Cruz

16.10 – 16.40    Guest Speaker: Professor Aggelos Kiayias, Decentralised systems: A new era of Information Technology services

16.40 – 17.10    Q&A Session

17.10 – 17.15    Closing remarks

17.15 – 18.00    Networking with refreshments 

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Speakers

Aggelos Kiayias is chair in Cyber Security and Privacy and director of the Blockchain Technology Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh. He is also the Chief Scientist at blockchain technology company Input Output Global. His research interests are in computer security, information security, applied cryptography and foundations of cryptography with a particular emphasis in blockchain technologies and distributed systems, e-voting and secure multiparty protocols as well as privacy and identity management.  

He has successfully lead technology transfer efforts that benefited millions of users in the domains of cyber security and cryptography. He holds a Ph.D. from the City University of New York and he is a graduate of the Mathematics department of the University of Athens. He has over 150 publications in journals and conference proceedings in the area. He has served as the program chair of the Cryptographers’ Track of the RSA conference in 2011 and the Financial Cryptography and Data Security conference in 2017, as well as the general chair of Eurocrypt 2013. He also served as the program chair of Real World Crypto Symposium 2020 and the Public-Key Cryptography Conference 2020. In 2021 he was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 

Dr. Jordana Viotto da Cruz is Lecturer in Entrepreneurship, University of Edinburgh Business School. She holds a PhD in Economics and she is interested in the economics of digital technologies, with an attention to digital platforms and to innovative online fundraising models (including crowdfunding and token sales). Dr. Viotto da Cruz has published on top journals in her field and has participated on policy-oriented projects about crowdfunding, digital piracy, and entrepreneurship.

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Please register to attend the event.

For assistance with registrations, please contact us on eievents@ei.ed.ac.uk