Program Committee

Program Chairs

Dr Peter Robinson has twenty-three granted patents in fields ranging from distributed computing, cryptography, blockchain, and virtualisation to graphical password design. He holds a Bachelor of Computer Engineering and a Masters of Business Administration from Queensland University of Technology, a Masters of Telecommunications Engineering from University of Wollongong, a PhD at University of Queensland, with thesis topic “Crosschain Communications: Blockchain Discovery, Atomic Crosschain Function Calls, and Blockchain State Pinning”, and is a graduate of the International Space University.

Google Scholar, Linkedin, Twitter, GitHub

Dr Sandra Johnson is a Senior Researcher at ConsenSys Software and has a PhD in Environmental Statistics. She is a visiting fellow at School of Mathematics, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane. Her research interests include statistical modelling and incentive systems analysis. Before joining ConsenSys she worked as a data scientist, researcher and sessional academic at QUT, and software engineer. She enjoys applying her wide range of experiences to research within the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Academic Track

Dr Thomas Hardjono is the CTO of Connection Science and Technical Director of the MIT Trust-Data Consortium at MIT in Cambridge, MA. USA. He is an early pioneer in the field of digital identities and trusted hardware, and instrumental in the development and broad adoption of the MIT Kerberos authentication protocol. His activities include leading standard development efforts, notably at the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), IEEE, Trusted Computing Group, Confidential Computing Alliance and others. He has published over 70 technical conference/journal papers, several books and over 30 patents. He is currently involved in several startups around the MIT community. His current area of interest is Web3 Digital Assets, with focus on the interoperability of asset networks and survivability of these networks against cybersecurity attacks.

https://hardjono.mit.edu/
Linkedin

Dr Ermyas Abebe is currently a Senior Researcher at Consensys working on cross-chain communications. Before joining ConsenSys, he was a Senior Research Staff Member and Manager at IBM Research, where he led a team of researchers and engineers that explored the potential of Distributed Ledger Technologies to transform industries, economies and governments. He worked with businesses and governments across different geographies to conceive and build blockchain-based solutions for scenarios such as cross-border payments, trade finance, trade logistics and decentralised identity. His primary research focus has been to advance the state of blockchain technologies across the dimensions of scalability and interoperability. He co-led the creation of Hyperledger Weaver, which is a decentralised interoperability protocol for enterprise blockchains. Ermyas has published numerous academic papers and filed over 30 patents.

Google Scholar, Linkedin, Twitter, GitHub

Dr Ali Dorri is an Adjunct Lecturer at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. He was also a Postgraduate research student at CSIRO, Australia. His Ph.D. theses received UNSW Dean’s Award for Outstanding PhD Theses. He was ranked among the top 1% scientists globally for the citation impact in the 2020 published by Stanford University. He is the lead author of a book titled “blockchain for cyberphysical systems” published by ArtechHouse 2020. He has published over 40 papers which collectively received over 4100 citations with h-index of 19. Ali served on the organising committee of several conferences including ICBC, BCCA, and SLDT and delivered several talks and tutorials. His research interest includes blockchain, cyber security, IoT, privacy, and smart grid.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Dr Joanne Fuller is a Senior Researcher at ConsenSys Software and has a PhD in Cryptography. Her research interests include formal methods, cryptography and data science. Before joining ConsenSys Joanne worked for many years as an academic at QUT and then for a short period as a consultant data scientist. Joanne is part of the Trustworthy Smart Contracts Team at ConsenSys and in 2021 was part of the team to formally verify the Phase 0 Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain reference implementation in Dafny.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Dr Victor Luchangco is a Principal Algorithms Researcher at Algorand, where he works on protocols and languages for blockchains. He is a co-author of The Art of Multiprocessor Programming, and is a recipient of the 2022 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing. Before joining Algorand, he was at Oracle Labs and Sun Labs, where he worked on concurrent algorithms and data structures for shared-memory multiprocessors and the Fortress programming language. He has authored over 50 papers and holds more than 40 patents. He received an Sc.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a dissertation on models for weakly consistent memories.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Dr Christian Vecchiola is a member of engineering team with ANZx. His interests focus on distributing computing technologies and cloud application development. Prior to join ANZx, Christian was with IBM Research – Australia holding the position of Senior Research Staff Member and Technical leader. In the last for years of his tenure in IBM he specialised in Blockchain technologies and financial services, by developing a range of distributed ledger based solutions that range from innovative and green field projects to production platforms.
Prior to joining IBM Christian was Research Fellow in Grid and Cloud Computing Systems at the University of Melbourne, under the direction of Prof. Rajkumar Buyya. Within that role, he collaborated he studied patterns and good practices for scientific computing in the cloud and led the design and development of the Aneka Cloud Computing Programming Platform.
He is co-author of “Mastering Cloud Computing: Foundations and Applications Programming” (Morgan Kaufmann, ISBN-13: 978-0124114548) and several publications in top tier journals and conferences in the field of distributed and cloud computing. Christian still actively contributes to the academic community by acting as program committee member and reviewer for conferences and journals such as Software Practice and Experience (SPE), Transactions on Service Computing (TSC), Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) and several others.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Dr Raghavendra Ramesh completed his PhD from Department of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, in the area of model-checking information flow security properties. His research interests mainly include formal verification, program analysis, distributed systems, cryptography and interoperable blockchains. He is currently working as Director of Research at SupraOracles.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Dr Luke Riley is Head of Innovation at Quant Network, leading R&D for their Overledger product, a blockchain-agnostic API gateway that enables DLT interoperability and the tokenisation of digital assets. He also has an ongoing association with King’s College London where he spent three years investigating voting in the distributed ledger technology domain, as well as developing their online DLT & cryptocurrencies module. He holds a Ph.D. in multi-agent systems from the University of Liverpool and in 2021 was selected as one of the top influencers in the UK blockchain industry by a UK parliamentary group report.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Dr Naipeng Dong is lecturer at UQ Cyber Security, School of Information Technology & Electrical Engineering, the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. She received her PhD from University of Luxembourg. Before joining UQ, she was a Research Fellow at School of Computing, National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on automatic formal verification of security and privacy in cryptographic protocols, Android applications and blockchain systems. She has worked on developing efficient automatic formal verification techniques, particularly on model checking and attacker knowledge reasoning, analysis and development of cryptographic systems, BAR (Byzantine-Altruistic-Rational) systems, smart contracts, and deep learning models.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Dr David Hyland-Wood is an entrepreneur and multi-disciplinary engineer based in Brisbane, Australia. He is currently serving as the Deputy Director of the Griffith University Defence Network. In 2018, he led the acquisition of pioneering space technology company Planetary Resources for ConsenSys, and led the creation of the first international blockchain standard, the Enterprise Ethereum Client Specification by the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. David also serves as Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at The University of Queensland.

https://www.hyland-wood.org/
Google Scholar, Linkedin, Twitter

Dr Franck Cassez‘s research interests are broadly in formal methods, more specifically automated verification techniques such as software verification and model-checking, static analysis. He has published more than 80 research papers in peer-reviewed journals & conferences, 1 US patent and contributed verification tools and software packages.
Before joining ConsenSys, Franck worked as a research scientist/academic for 25 years, at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS, France), National ICT Australia (NICTA now DATA61, Sydney AU) and Macquarie University (Sydney AU). He is a Marie Curie Fellow (2008) and a conjoint Associate Professor at Macquarie University, Sydney.

https://franck44.github.io/
Google Scholar, Linkedin, Twitter, GitHub

Dr Thanh-Hai Tran is an applied researcher at ConsenSys. His research focuses on formal methods, distributed algorithms, and blockchains. Before joining ConsenSys, he did his Ph.D. in formal verification of distributed algorithms at TU Wien. Together with his co-authors, he won the best paper award at FORTE 2021 – the 41st International Conference on Formal Techniques for Distributed Objects, Components, and Systems. In addition, he worked with researchers from INRIA Nancy and TU Wien to develop the model checker APALACHE for the specification language TLA+.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Dr Nour El Madhoun is an Associate Professor of “Computer Science, Cybersecurity and Blockchain” and head of the engineering cycle – Digital Security and Networks at ISEP – Engineering School in Paris. She is also an Associate Researcher at Sorbonne Université (LIP6-PHARE Team). She received her Master’s degree in Networks/Computer Science from Sorbonne Université/Télécom ParisTech in 2014, and her Ph.D. degree in Cybersecurity/Computer Science from Sorbonne Université in 2018. At Sorbonne Université, she became an ATER in 2017. In 2018, she gained industry experience through working as a post-doctoral researcher on blockchain and smart-contract technologies at Orange Labs. From 2019 to 2020, she joined ISEP – Engineering School in Paris, as an Associate Professor of “Cybersecurity and Blockchain” in addition to overseeing the engineering cycle – Digital Security and Networks. From 2020 to 2022, she joined, EPITA – Engineering school in Paris, as an Associate Professor of “Cybersecurity and Blockchain”. Her current research focuses on network security, cryptographic protocols, EMV payment, NFC technology, and blockchain and smart-contracts technologies.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Dr David Pearce graduated with a PhD from Imperial College London in 2005, and was an A/Prof at Victoria University of Wellington before joining ConsenSys in 2022. David’s PhD thesis was on efficient algorithms for pointer analysis of C, and his techniques have since been incorporated into GCC. His interests are in programming languages, compilers and static analysis.
Since 2009, David has been developing the Whiley Programming Language (whiley.org) which is designed specifically to simplify program verification. Prior to that, David developed the Java Compiler Kit (JKit), which is an open source Java Compiler aimed at simplifying static analysis. David has previously interned at Bell Labs, New Jersey, where he worked on compilers for FPGAs; and also at IBM Hursely, UK, where he worked with the AspectJ development team on profiling systems.

https://whileydave.com
Google Scholar, Linkedin, Twitter

Dr Gowri Sankar Ramachandran is a Research Fellow at the Trusted Networks Lab, Queensland University of Technology. Gowri has completed his PhD from KU Leuven, Belgium. After his PhD, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher and senior research associate at the University of Southern California, USA, between 2017 and 2020. Gowri’s research interests revolve around the Blockchain, supply chains, and IoT. He is broadly interested in solving privacy and trust issues in decentralised architectures. Gowri has served on the organisation committees of ACM and IEEE conferences such as ICBC, SenSys, IoTDI, IPSN, EWSN, and BlockSys.

https://www.qut.edu.au/about/our-people/academic-profiles/g.ramachandran
Google Scholar, Linkedin

Dr Dhinakaran Vinayagamurthy is a Research Scientist in the IBM India Research Lab. He is also an IBM Quantum Senior Ambassador. His research areas are in cryptography and quantum computing. In IBM, he has led or contributed to projects in encrypted databases, privacy-preserving machine learning, zero-knowledge proofs and blockchain interoperability. He is a maintainer of the Hyperledger Foundation’s flagship interoperability project Cacti, and participates in the IETF standardization effort on blockchain interoperability. Dhinakaran holds a PhD in Computer Science (Quantum Information) from the University of Waterloo, a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Toronto and a BE in Computer Science and Engineering from the College of Engineering, Guindy.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Dr Chenyi Zhang is an applied researcher at ConsenSys Software. He has a PhD in computer science from the school of Computer Science and Engineering, the University of New South Wales (UNSW). His research interests include Blockchain protocol analysis, program analysis, formal verification and artificial intelligence, with various applications to security.

Linkedin

Dr Ivo Kubjas is a senior research engineer at ConsenSys, working on the gnark framework for implementing zk-SNARKs. He obtained his PhD from University of Tartu, Estonia, working on algebraic approaches for decentralized systems. He previously worked at Smartmatic, designing and implementing online voting systems for jurisdictions in regions all over the world.

Google Scholar, Linkedin, Twitter, GitHub

Dr Helen Paik is Senior Lecturer at School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales (UNSW). Helen is also a visiting researcher at CSIRO’s Data61, research staff in the Cybersecurity Cooperative Research Centre, and the Faculty Lead in UNSW Institute for Cyber Security. Her research interests include distributed software systems and architectures, privacy and security in distributed systems, cyber physical systems, blockchain, and applied machine learning.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Dr Milad Ketabi works at ConsenSys as an applied researcher. In collaboration with the Trustworthy Smart Contract team, he uses formal verification techniques and tools for eventually providing mathematical guarantees on the correctness and security of smart contracts from the source level down to its bytecode. Previously, Milad worked at the department of computer sciences of UNSW as a postdoctoral research fellow researching the area of formal verification of neural networks. He also worked with the Trustworthy Systems at UNSW verifying the initializer of the seL4 secure micro-kernel. He had completed his PhD at ANU where he introduced a novel framework of reasoning for addressing the verifiability problem in the area of electronic elections

Linkedin

Rafael Belchior is a researcher at INESC-ID, a Fulbright awardee (incoming visiting research at MIT) and a 3rd-year Ph.D. student at Técnico Lisboa. Studying the intersection of blockchain interoperability and security, he focuses on enabling interoperability across heterogeneous blockchains. He participates in different open-source ecosystems, namely at the Internet Engineering Task Force (SATP protocol) and Hyperledger Cacti. Currently he is a Senior R&D Engineer at Blockdaemon.

https://rafaelapb.github.io/
Linkedin

Dr Babu Pillai is a Lecturer and researcher at Southern Cross University within the faculty of science and engineering, Gold Coast, Australia. His research interest is in Blockchain, predominantly within the area of security, interoperability, digital assets, and application developments. He holds a Ph.D. in Blockchain (cross-chain technology) and a Masters in Information Technology from Griffith University. He received his technical qualification in Civil Engineering from India in 1995 and has worked in Australia, India, and the Middle East as an engineering professional in the building industry before joining academia in 2017.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Yingjie Xue is a PhD candidate at Computer Science Department, Brown University, USA. Her research interests span the area of blockchain technology and distributed computing. She is interested in designing protocols for various applications. She received her Masters degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from University of Science and Technology of China, China.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Martin Westerkamp is a PhD candidate at the research group of Service-centric Networking at Technische Universität Berlin. His current research interests relate to Blockchain-Interoperability with a focus on Cross-Chain Smart Contract interaction and migration. Before joining TU Berlin, he obtained his Master’s degree in Information Systems from the University of Münster in 2017. During exchanges at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), South Korea, and the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIMC), India, he gained knowledge in the fields of mobile networks and protocol design.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Roberto Saltini received a bachelor and master degree in Information Technology from the University of Bologna. He is currently leading the Dependable Distributed Systems research team at ConsenSys. His main research interests include formal verification of distributed systems, consensus protocols and blockchain.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Tiancheng Xieis a UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate. He is working on cryptography, especially zero-knowledge proofs. He has published papers at top conference CRYPTO, S&P, CCS, and USENIX Security.

https://dblp.org/pid/216/6422.html

Applications of Technology Track

Dr Weijia Zhang is the Vice President of Engineering at Wanchain and Regional Head China for the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. He is co-chair of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance’s Crosschain Interoperability Task Force.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Chris Winfry is the cofounder of Hop Protocol and the author of the Hop whitepaper. Hop is one of the leading cross-chain bridges on Ethereum, has processed nearly $3B to date, and has a flawless security track record. Chris previously founded Authereum, an Ethereum based wallet and Level K a boutique smart-contract security firm.

https://hop.exchange/whitepaper.pdf
Linkedin, Twitter, GitHub

Angela Potter is a Lead Product Manager at ConsenSys, focused on crosschain products. Previously she was a Director of Product Management at Salesforce working on the Salesforce mobile app. She has a background in UX design and web development.

Linkedin, Twitter, GitHub

Dr Mark Staples is a Senior Principal Researcher in CSIRO’s Data61, and the CTO for the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre. His research interests include software engineering, software architecture, blockchain, and regtech. He is on the ISO TC307 blockchain and DLT standards committee, working on the foundation standards and records management, and contributes to other standards on smart contracts and governance. He has been a member of the OECD’s Blockchain Expert Policy Advisory Board, and a member of the steering committee for Australian Government’s National Blockchain Roadmap. He is an experienced research manager and software engineering manager. He has a PhD in computer science from the University of Cambridge.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Aiman Baharna is the Head of Engineering at Clearmatics, building blockchain protocols and platforms for decentralized markets. He has nearly two decades of technology experience including software engineering for distributed and mission-critical systems in finance and other industries.

Linkedin

Peter Somogyvari is a technology architect manager at Accenture and a maintainer of Hyperledger Cactus, an open-source, pluggable enterprise-grade framework to transact on multiple distributed ledgers without introducing yet another competing blockchain.

Linkedin, Twitter, GitHub

Coenie Beyers holds an Msc Eng (Cum Laude) from Stellenbosch University and is an experienced software engineer with a demonstrated history of working in the computer software and banking industries. He started getting involved with blockchain technology from 2013 and has been involved with designing and building multiple blockchain projects since 2015. He fulfilled the role of Ethereum expert during project Ubin phase 2 at the MAS and led the overall technical design and implementation for a confidential and distributed RTGS system for project Khokha for the SARB.

Linkedin

Dr Yongzheng Jia is the founder and CEO of Overeality Labs. He is also a postdoc researcher at UC Berkeley. Dr. Yongzheng Jia received his Ph.D. and bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University (Yao Class). He has broad research interests in blockchain and Internet systems including scalability and interoperability of blockchain systems, web3 innovations, large-scale social networks, and distributed systems. He has published papers at top conferences in the Internet and blockchain fields including WWW, IEEE/ACM ToN, JSAC, ACM CCS, ICSE, and ICDCS.

Google Scholar, Linkedin

Pramod Shashidhara is the Senior Engineering Manager at Chainlink Labs, where he leads the development of core products related to smart contract automation, on-chain randomness, and interoperability. His research interests include cross-chain interoperability, blockchain primitives for developers, and operationalizing & scaling of blockchain applications. He has over a decade of experience building mission-critical distributed systems, enabling robust cloud security, identity, and access management for finance and project management software.

Linkedin