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Wed
18
Mar
2020
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Event

Collider

Postponed- BLING GeoPact Collider: Location based digital contracts

Can blockchain technologies redesign the way we transport people and things around cities?

This event has now been postponed due to the changing situation regarding Coronavirus. We will reschedule the event for later in the year, keep an eye on the website for more details.

Blockchain and DLTs (Digital Ledger Technologies) have catalysed new thinking around the use of distributed systems to transform the provision of services that help to move people and things through cities. Smart contracts are computational agreements, that run on blockchains which provide a guarantee, so that people and organisations can create these agreements with each other about how things should take place, without the need for a trusted third party such as a lawyer. It has been speculated that these may enable people to easily create trusted agreements with each other about how things happen relatively quickly and cheaply. A utopian view is that this technology might open up the design of public services to a broader population. However, this ideal has yet to materialise. There are many questions to answer such as: – Who creates the smart contracts? And how? And how will smart contracts adapt to the messiness of real life?

We have created GeoPact, a system that supports the deployment of location-aware smart contracts. These contracts use location data as part of coded agreements about how objects and people move in space and time. Secured through internet of things (IoT) devices and distributed ledger technology (DLT) these produce new possibilities for location-based transactions. To kick off this collider we will use GeoPact to demonstrate some simple smart contracts in action.

A Collider is a conceptual design event, bringing together computational thinking and design thinking, to pull informaticians together with designers and problem holders. At the start of the Collider we will set the scene by presenting the GeoPact technology and demonstrating its potential. This will be followed by three inspirational talks, before breaking out into workshop sessions.

Presenters Include:

  • Dr. Grigorios (Greg) Fountas is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Engineering and the Built Environment at the Edinburgh Napier University. His research interests include statistical and econometric applications to various aspects of transportation planning and engineering, travel behavior for emerging transportation technologies, transportation safety, analysis of driving behavior, and infrastructure asset management.
  • Burkhard Schafer is Professor for Computational Legal Theory and Director of the SCRIPT Centre for IT and IP law at the University of Edinburgh. In his spare time, he wonders if it would be a good idea to replace lawyers with computers, or vice versa.
  • Ed Stack, Creative Director of Delic, an innovative platform for the music industry https://www.delic.network

Registration will begin from 1.30pm with the event starting at 2pm until 5pm.

The BLING project combines the expertise of knowledge institutions and the playingfield of municipalities and governmental organisations together with businesses and citizens, to investigate what role Blockchain can be for governments.

A collaborative event between the Institute for Design Informatics and SEStrans as part of the EU Interreg funded BLING project.

Places are free but space is limited so please do sign up in advance via Eventbrite.

Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB