IIT Bombay’s UBRI (University Blockchain Research Initiative) has successfully collaborated with Ripple, giving the sense of advancement of the blockchain involving projects and programs within the campuses of the academic communities.
Commenting on this, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay Professor R.K. Shyamasundar says that
In the discussion, he talks about the significance of blockchains in the business world and the requirement for hands-on exposure and well-defined knowledge in that area.
Professor Shyamasundar further elucidates on the topic saying the university’s Center for Economic Policy and Centre for Alternative Technologies for Rural Applications have now been looking at using UBRI to use blockchain for their particular requirements appropriately.
Beyond the academic efforts, IIT Bombay has also been involved in real-world blockchain collaborations within the private and government sectors. The university has been in focus for regional stakeholders concerning blockchain. Further, he said that the university is offering consultancy services for startups and leaders of the industry. IIT Bombay currently has ongoing blockchain collaboration in place with Data61/CSIRO and major Australian universities.
In this workshop by Professor Shyamasundar, people from reputed blockchain organizations presented a bunch of papers which were discussed upon by students and seniors, thus providing an active hub for mutual learning.
The faculty focuses on many topics of interest like concurrent operations, robust smart contracts, theoretical foundations on scalability & performance tradeoffs, permissioned ledgers and DLTs., DLT applications to land management, privacy, security, anonymity, IoT security, healthcare, cryptocurrency and crypto-assets, and a lot more. With UBRI, now the university can use its own XRP Validator on campus to facilitate learning.
With the plenty of students now interested in developing projects involving AI or Machine Learning based applications in land management, financial aids and healthcare and predictions for Bitcoin, XRP Ledger Consensus Protocols, the privacy of transactions, etc., the professor thinks that data generated from this validator can lead in these new research directions. He even mentioned about three undergraduate students keenly working in these areas.
For UBRI-funded research, Professor Shyamasundar hopes to work together with Fintech and government partners in the future.
IIT Bombay students are already studying one of the most important topics: trust management, as part of the university’s Security & Privacy research along with exploring the delivery of desired security properties over distributed systems using blockchain.
Navin Gupta, the managing director of Ripple, has stated the Company’s idea of ‘creating the next generation of students and entrepreneurs.’ Prof. Shyamasundar is positive about blockchain helping in bringing consistency to the collection and use of data.
Until now, many universities across the globe have benefitted from the $50-million Ripple fund for its global University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI). With IIT Bombay, being added to the list, the number has now reached 17.
Professor Shyamasundar says,
But he also has uncertainties about this invasive data gathering. Due to the race to monetize it, people are getting very skeptical and concerned about the cost versus benefit of sharing their own data.
He hopes for the students at the IIT to take complete advantage of their training at the forefront for all these new interesting projects