Seminario Virtual: BLOCKCHAINS

Amr El Abbadi is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his B. Eng. from Alexandria University, Egypt, and his Ph.D. from Cornell University. Prof. El Abbadi is an ACM Fellow, AAAS Fellow, and IEEE Fellow. He was Chair of the Computer Science Department at UCSB from 2007 to 2011. He has served as a journal editor for several journals, including, The VLDB Journal, IEEE Transactions on Computers and The Computer Journal. He has been Program Chair for multiple databaseand distributed systems conferences. He currently serves on the executive committee of the IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering (TCDE) and was a board member of the VLDB Endowment from 2002 to 2008. In 2007, Prof. El Abbadi received the UCSB Senate Outstanding Mentorship Award for his excellence in mentoring graduate students. In 2013, his student, Sudipto Das received the SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award. Prof. El Abbadi is also a co-recipient of the Test of Time Award at EDBT/ICDT 2015. He has published over 300 articles in databases and distributed systems and has supervised over 35 PhD students.

Maurice Herlihy has an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from M.I.T. He has served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University and the staff of DEC Cambridge Research Lab. He is the recipient of the 2003 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing, the 2004 Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science, the 2008 ISCA influential paper award, the 2012 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, and the 2013 Wallace McDowell award. He received a 2012 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the NaturalSciences and Engineering Lecturing Fellowship, and he is fellow of the ACM, a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Mark Rakhmilevich is Senior Director of Blockchain Product Management at Oracle and is responsible for Blockchain Technologies strategy and products. As part of Oracle Development he focuses on evolving Oracle Blockchain Platform and Oracle Database Blockchain Tables in the cloud and on-premises based on the needs of enterprise customers and SI & ISV partners for scalable, secure, production-ready platform for building and deploying enterprise-oriented blockchain networks. He helps set the strategy for Oracle’s blockchain efforts and guide customers and partners around the world in applying blockchain technology to deliver on key business outcomes – accelerating growth, reducing costs and friction in business ecosystems, reducing risk and fraud, and bringing to market innovative solutions that solve real-world societal challenges. Mark facilitates customers’ blockchain journey from rapid experimentation to live production through discovery, sharing industry use cases and best practices, recommending deployment models and integration architectures.
He has broad experience in enterprise solutions leveraging distributed systems, SOA and OLTP middleware, and PKI in banks, payment networks, telcos, insurance, and government for over 20 years as a developer, architect, and product manager. He holds Master’s degree in Computer Science and is a member of Phi Betta Kappa honor society. Mark delivers customer workshops and seminars, writes on blockchain topics on Oracle blockchain blog and elsewhere, frequently speaks at industry conferences on enterprise blockchain and hosts Hyperledger Silicon Valley meetups.

Dr. Antonio Fernández Anta is a Research Professor at IMDEA Networks. Previously he was a Full Professor at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC) and was on the Faculty of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), where he received an award for his research productivity. He was a postdoc at MIT from 1995 to 1997, and spent sabbatical years at Bell Labs Murray Hill and MIT Media Lab. He has been awarded the Premio Nacional de Informática “Aritmel” in 2019 and is a Mercator Fellow of the SFB MAKI in Germany since 2018. He has more than 25 years of research experience, and more than 200 scientific publications. He was the Chair of the Steering Committee of DISC and has served in the TPC of numerous conferences and workshops. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of SW Louisiana in 1992 and 1994, respectively. He completed his undergraduate studies at the UPM, having received awards at the university and national level for his academic performance. He is a Senior Member of ACM and IEEE.

Vincent Gramoli is an Associate Professor and the head of the Concurrent Systems Research Group at the University of Sydney, and a Visiting Professor at EPFL. Prior to this, he was affiliated with INRIA, University of Neuchâtel and Cornell University. Vincent received his Habilitation from Sorbonne University. He is a Future Fellow of the Australian Research Council.

In this talk we present a whirlwind tour of the brief but vibrant history of the cryptocoins and their associated computational and information security models. We also present a description of how cryptocurrencies are used for performing commercial transactions and financial operations in a secure manner, including a brief discussion of how zero knowledge protocols (zk-SNARKs) can be used for achieving full anonymity on cryptocurrency transactions. Then, we discuss the risk level associated with several menaces threatening the cryptocurrency ecosystem, namely, a concerted international governmental intervention, environmental concerns related to the expensive power consumption of the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus protocol and, cryptographic attacks implemented in quantum computers by means of the fearsome, powerful and wonderful polynomial-time factorization algorithm devised by Peter Shor in 1994.

Francisco Rodríguez-Henríquez received his PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Oregon State University in June, 2000. From July 2000 to May 2002, Dr. Rodríguez-Henríquez was collaborating as a security architect for IT companies in Germany and the U.S. Currently, he is a professor (CINVESTAV-3D Researcher) in the Computer Science Department of the Advanced Research Center (CINVESTAV-IPN) at Mexico City, which he joined in May 2002. Since May 2021, Dr. Rodríguez-Henríquez is Technical Director in the Cryptography Research Centre of the Technology Innovation Institute at Abu Dhabi, UAE.
Dr. Rodríguez-Henríquez has co-authored over 80 technical papers and several book chapters. He is also the first author of the book Cryptographic Algorithms on Reconfigurable Hardware, published by Springer in November 2006. Additionally, Dr. Rodríguez-Henríquez has served in a number of program committees of information security and cryptographic international conferences. He is or has been in the editorial boards of Journal of Universal Computer Science, the VLSI Integration Journal of Elsevier, Journal of cryptographic Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing and the IEEE Transactions on Computers journal.
Dr. Rodríguez-Henríquez is co-founder of the International Conference on Cryptology and Information Security in Latin America (Latincrypt) and the Advanced School on Cryptology and Information Security in Latin America (ASCrypto), which are considered the leading cryptographic periodical meetings in the Latin America region.
Dr. Rodríguez-Henríquez research interests lie in cryptography, computer arithmetic and information security.

Baltazar Rodríguez es un consultor estratégico en tecnología y tiene una amplia carrera de más de 29 años habilitando la transformación de diversas instituciones mediante el uso de tecnologías de la información. A través de los años ha trabajado en proyectos para empresas de telecomunicaciones, banca y gobierno, resaltando en particular su gestión como CTO del Servicio de Administración Tributaria y como asesor de proyectos de transformación en el Sector Salud en México. Actualmente labora en IBM como arquitecto y consultor, especializándose en aplicar el valor transformador de nuevas tecnologías habilitadoras tales como Blockchain, Inteligencia Artificial, Computo Cuántico y el Internet de las Cosas.