Ingo Weber, PhD

Date/Time: 06.07.2016, 12:00

Location: D2.2.094

Abstract

The integration of business processes across organizations is a key driver of productivity gains. However, collaborative process execution is problematic if the organisations involved have a lack of trust in each other. As a result, if there are three or more parties in a collaboration, it can be hard to make a decision on which organisation should control the process that ties them together.  

Blockchain is an emerging technology for decentralized and transactional data sharing across a large network of untrusted participants. It can enable new forms of distributed systems and collaborations, where participants can find agreement about their shared state without trusting a central authority or any particular participant. Blockchain network also provides a global computational infrastructure that can run autonomous programs called smart contracts.  

In this talk, I will discuss results from an observational study on current use of Blockchain smart contracts. Then I will outline our proposal for using Blockchain to replace a central authority and facilitate collaborative process execution. Our solution comprises the combination of an intricate set of components, which allow utilising the computational infrastructure of Blockchain network to either monitor or coordinate business processes. We implemented our solution and demonstrate the feasibility of our approach through observations made when applying it to three use case processes.

Bio

Dr. Ingo Weber is a Principal Research Scientist and Team Leader of the Architecture & Analytics Platforms (AAP) team at Data61, CSIRO (formerly NICTA) in Sydney. He is also an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), University of New South Wales (UNSW). He has published over 70 refereed papers and co-authored two books. Prior to CSIRO / NICTA, Ingo worked at UNSW, and at SAP Research in Karlsruhe, Germany. While at SAP, he completed his PhD thesis at the Research Center for Information Technologies (FZI) and the University of Karlsruhe (TH).