Title：Untangling Blockchain Systems vis-à-vis Data Systems

Speaker：OOI Beng Chin （National University of Singapore）

Time：5.30 15:00-16:00

Venue：East main-buliding 10-103

Abstract：Blockchain technologies are taking the world by storm. Public blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, enable secure peer-to-peer applications like crypto-currency or smart contracts. Private blockchain systems, on the other hand, target and aim to disrupt applications which have so far been implemented on top of database systems, for example banking, finance and trading applications. Multiple platforms for private blockchains are being actively developed and fine tuned. However, there is a clear lack of a systematic framework with which different systems can be analyzed and compared against each other. Such a framework is essential to assess blockchains' viability as another distributed data processing platform, while helping developers to identify bottlenecks and accordingly improve their platforms. In this talk, I shall examine the design and properties of blockchain systems vis-à-vis data systems, including distributed and decentralized, and briefly present a benchmarking framework. I shall also discuss our various works on improving the performance of blockchain systems, and our use of blockchain in the domain of healthcare, namely MediLOT.

Bio: OOI Beng Chin is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, NGS faculty member and Director of SSI at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and an adjunct Chang Jiang Professor at Zhejiang University. He obtained his BSc (1st Class Honors) and PhD from Monash University, Australia, in 1985 and 1989 respectively. His research interests include database, distributed processing, and large scale analytics, in the aspects of system architectures, performance, security, and correctness.

He is a fellow of the ACM , IEEE, and Singapore National Academy of Science (SNAS). He received ACM SIGMOD 2009 Contribution Award, 2011 Singapore President’s Science Award, and 2016 CCF Overseas Outstanding Contribution Award.

He is a co-fonder of companies such as yzBigData, Shentilium Technologies, and MediLot Technologies in the areas of AI- and data-driven financial data analytics, and blockchain based healthcare data management and analytics.