Participation at the Blockchain Technology Dagstuhl Seminar in Germany

Alevtina Dubovitskaya, researcher at the Institute of Information Systems HES-SO Valais-Wallis, participated in a recent Dagstuhl Seminar: Blockchain Technology for Collaborative Information Systems that took place in mid-August in Germany.

Dagstul seminars promote personal interaction and open discussion of results as well as ideas. Unlike at most conferences, the focus is not solely on the presentation of established results but to equal parts on results, ideas and open problems.

The emergence of blockchain technology has opened manifold opportunities to redesign business-to-business collaborations in a wide range of fields, including healthcare, supply chain, logistics, and others. Blockchains and smart contracts enable execution of processes in a distributed manner without delegating trust to central authorities nor requiring mutual trust between each pair of parties. However, multiple challenges have to be addressed when applying the blockchain technology. The audience of the seminar combines academic and industrial researchers in security and privacy, blockchain technology, software engineering, databases, distributed systems, information systems engineering, business process management, supply chain management, and logistics.

During the seminar, participants shortly presented their work and then worked in the groups in order to establish a research roadmap for blockchain-based collaborative information systems, and to initiate concrete collaborations between participants along this roadmap.

Alevtina presented ongoing blockchain-research projects of AISLab of the Institute of Information Systems HES-SO Valais-Wallis: using blockchain technology for healthcare and combining multi-agent systems and blockchain. She also participated in the group discussions and initiated some collaborations tackling the following challenges: distributed data management in the context of blockchain; providing security, privacy and compliance with the laws and regulations for blockchain-based applications.