November 11, 2019 (14:15 | SR 6): CT-Talk with Yvonne-Anne Pignolet

on "Of Trust and Ledgers...

... and how they transform how we'll run software"

Abstract: The functionality that distributed ledger technology provides, i.e., an immutable and fraud-resistant registry with validation and verification mechanisms, has traditionally been implemented with a trusted third party. Due to the distributed nature of ledger technology, there is a strong recent trend towards using ledgers to implement novel decentralized applications for a wide range of use cases, e.g., in the financial sector and sharing economy.
In the first part of this talk I present an abstract view of ledger use cases and present two fundamental criteria that must be met for any use case to be implemented using a ledger-based approach without having to rely on any particular party in the system. In the second part, I present how DFINITY's Internet Computer builds on ledger technology and other advances in computer science for a novel way of developing and running software on a tamperproof open cloud platform.

Bio: Yvonne-Anne Pignolet's work is centered around networked systems, ranging from the design of algorithms for reliable and efficient distributed systems despite failures and malicious behaviour to the analysis of complex network evolution. After her PhD at ETH Zurich in 2009 she was a postdoc at IBM Research Zurich and Ben Gurion University, Be'er Sheva. Yvonne-Anne recently joined DFINITY after 8 years at ABB Corporate Research as a Principal Scientist.