IC3 Blockchain Initiative Adds European Researchers

Announcements, Blockchain | November 2, 2017 By:

The Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3), has added three European universities to expand its research team in the region.

IC3, an initiative of faculty members at Cornell University, Cornell Tech, UC Berkeley, UIUC, and the Technion, offers world-class expertise in computer science that spans cryptography, distributed systems, game theory, programming languages, and system security techniques. IC3’s innovations include new blockchains, smart contracts, and cryptocurrency technologies that offer both the scientifically rigorous security properties and the robustness, performance, and reliability demanded by practitioners for tomorrow’s financial systems of execution and record.

The latest researchers to join IC3 include faculty members at the University College London(UCL), ETH Zurich, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL).

The new faculty members are Sarah Meiklejohn, Associate Professor, in the departments of Computer Science and Security and Crime Science at UCL, Srdjan Capkun, Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich and Director of the Zurich Information Security and Privacy Center, and Bryan Ford, Associate Professor, leads the Decentralized/Distributed Systems (DEDIS) lab at EPFL.

In addition, Maureen O’Hara, the Robert W. Purcell Professor of Finance at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, will be joining her IC3 colleagues from Cornell.

Emin Gün Sirer, co-director of IC3 and Associate Professor at Cornell University, said that this expansion will bring fresh new perspectives into IC3, growing their research portfolio and reach and expanding them geographically to those places on the globe where exciting new blockchain deployment developments are taking place.

Ford stated that this combination of leading-edge expertise will be essential in enabling blockchain technology to fulfill the promise it has inspired across innumerable sectors of business and society.”

O’Hara said that she sees tremendous potential for the blockchain to transform the financial system and the work of IC3 can lead that transformation.