The mini-conference and showcase which will take place on May 25th on the last day of UBC’s Blockchain Summer Institute (May 14-25th), and just before a two-day Blockathon (Blockchain Hackathon for Social Good) and feature high profile international innovators and thought leaders and a TALENT+INNOVATION showcase that will bring students who have been participating in the Blockchain Summer Institute together with local and international industry partners for networking around jobs and internship opportunities.

Agenda: 8:30:Registration

9:00 – Open and Welcome – Dr. Victoria Lemieux, Blockchain@UBC

9:30 - “The Future of Blockchain: An Ethereum Perspective” – Bob Summerwill

10:00 – “The Future of Blockchain: Perspectives on Bitcoin”- Dr. Shin’Ichiro Matsuo

10:30 – “The Future of Land Transaction on the Blockchain” – Michael Graglia

11:00 – Coffee break

11:30 - “Does Blockchain have a Governance Problem?” – Dr. Angela Walch

12:00 – “Does Blockchain Have a Future?” – Mark Bell

12:30 – Discussion & Awards Presentation

1:00 – Networking and Lunch

2:00 – TALENT+INNOVATION SHOWCASE (featuring a series of ligthning talks from our industry sponsors and opportunities for networking)

5:00 – Close – Dr. Victoria Lemieux

Speakers are highly-respected international innovators and thought leaders on blockchain and distributed ledger technology.

Dr. Shin’Ichiro Matsuo:

Dr. Matsuo is Professor of Research at Georgetown University, Advisor on Financial Cryptography to the Director of the MIT Media Lab, and a Research Follow at Keio University in Tokyo. His area of research is in cryptography and information security. He has made extensive contributions to technology standards: as an editor of three ISO/IEC standards on cryptographic protocols (Anonymous entity authentication ISO/IEC2009-2, secret sharing (ISO/IEC19592-1) and Verification of Cryptographic Protocols(ISO/IEC29128)), and contributed to IETF standardization of TLS1.3 on the security evaluation. He also founded an international consortium on security evaluation of cryptographic protocols, so called "CELLOS"​ consortium. US, UK, Estonian, French, and Japanese universities, research institutes, company and individuals participate this consortium. He has proposed a new hash specification suitable for real information systems, which was presented at 2nd cryptographic hash workshop held by NIST. He is providing academic contributions to emerging “Blockchain” technology by constructing BSafe.network, an international academic neutral research test network for blockchain technology, which has a similar role as NSFNet for the Internet development. The University of British Columbia is a participant in this network.

Dr. Angela Walch:

Angela Walch is an Associate Professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law. Her research focuses on money and the law, blockchain technologies, governance of emerging technologies and financial stability. She is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Blockchain Technologies of University College London. She has presented her research at Harvard Law School, University College London and with the Modern Money Network at Columbia Law School, among others. Her work on blockchain technologies has appeared in the NYU Journal of Legislation & Public Policy and in American Banker. Walch was nominated for “Blockchain Person of the Year” for 2016 by Crypto Coins News for her work on the governance of blockchain technologies and her influential article in American Banker arguing that the coders and miners of public blockchains should be treated as fiduciaries. Prior to joining the faculty at St. Mary’s, Walch practiced corporate law at the firm of Ropes & Gray in Boston, for which her practice included venture capital, life sciences and emerging companies work. After Ropes & Gray, she served as an attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at Harvard University. While at Harvard, she advised on general transactional matters and federal grants for international projects. Walch also practiced transactional law in London, where she worked in-house for Sainsbury’s (a large British supermarket chain) and served as general counsel for Brand Events, a venture-backed consumer events company that produced premier events (Taste of London, Top Gear Live) around the world.

Michael Graglia:

Michael Graglia is the director of the Future of Property Rights initiative at New America. Graglia comes from a career in international development and strategy that has seen him in finance at the Gates Foundation, program evaluation at BCG, developing a global tertiary education network at the World Bank Group, managing a national refugee program for the International Catholic Migration Commission in Zimbabwe, and teaching math in Peace Corps Namibia where he founded a scholarship program to fund women's education.

Graglia has an MBA from Columbia University where he was a Bronfman Fellow, an MA in Southeast Asian studies from Johns Hopkins SAIS where his studies were supported by the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. Graglia studied mathematics and computer science at Gonzaga University, S.J.

Bob Summerwill:

Bob Summerwill is a community leader for the Ethereum Project, serving as Enterprise Ethereum's lead architect and a member of ConsenSys, Community Ambassador for the Sweetbridge Project and an advisor to Varro Technologies, and a founding member of the Ethereum Enteprise Alliance, established to create open standards and protocols for the Ethereum blockchain network. He first met Vitalik Buterin in 2014 and has been actively involved in the Ethereum project since 2015. He has been building bridges to enterprise and towards mainstream adoption since 2016. Originally from the UK, he has lived in Vancouver since 2003, and is now a dual citizen of Canada and the UK.

Mark Bell:

Mark Bell is a Digital Researcher at The UK National Archives. Previous to this role, Mark has over 20 years of experience working with database technologies in industries such as telecoms and banking, as well as in government. At The National Archives Mark led the research for the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project, ‘Traces through Time’, tackling the challenges of identifying individuals in historical documents. His research interests include dealing with uncertainty in data, automated text recognition, and Distributed Ledger Technology, and he is TNA’s lead researcher on their Archangel project, which explores the long-term sustainability of digital archives though the design, development and trialling of transformational new distributed ledger technology (DLT) to promote accessibility and ensure integrity of content, whilst maximizing its impact through novel business models for commodification and open access.