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1 October 2019 - Fintech, Values and Society: Decentralising Markets and Financial Services

Speaker:

Prof. Aggelos Kiayias: Chair in Cyber Security and Privacy, University of Edinburgh

Overview:

The advent of new information technology tools such as blockchains and distributed ledgers brought forth the possibility of creating markets and financial services that are organised in a peer to peer fashion, without relying on intermediaries while at the same time scaling globally. The technology that enables such decentralisation has been considered as a possible disruptive force that can fundamentally change the way people engage in finance related activities. In this talk, I will give a high level overview of the underlying technology, outline challenges and open questions, and review how various financial systems and services that can benefit from it.

Bio.

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 IOHK. 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 over 100 publications in journals and conference proceedings in the area. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing and 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. He was the general chair of Eurocrypt 2013. He is currently the program chair of Real World Crypto 2020 and the International Conference on Practice and Theory of Public-Key Cryptography 2020.

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