Talks:
Marko Vukolic
Blockchain Scalability
Abstract
Scalability is probably the most important and the most challenging technical problem standing in front of wide adoption of the blockchain and distirbuted ledger technologies. Scalability challenges for blokchain come in at least two flavors, scalability of the distributed consensus/block ordering mechanisms, and the scalability of application and smart-contract execution. In this talk, we will briefly overview these challenges in the context of permissionless and permissioned blockchains and overview recent proposal to overcoming these challenges. We will also point out some promising research and development directions.
About the lecturer
Marko Vukolic re-joined IBM Research in January 2015, as a Research Staff Member (earlier, he was also a Post-Doc and Intern in IBM). Before that, he was a faculty in EURECOM, and a visiting professor at Systems Group @ ETH Zurich.
He obtained a Doctor of Science (PhD) degree in Distributed Systems from EPFL in the Distributed Programming Laboratory (LPD) in 2008. Before PhD, he graduated from EPFL Doctoral School in Computer and Communication Sciences in 2003 and obtained a dipl.ing. degree in Electrical Engineering (Telecommunications) from School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, in 2001.
His research interests lie in the broad area of distributed systems. Some more specific topics that he is currently interested in include fault-tolerance, blockchain and distributed ledgers, cloud computing security and distributed storage.