Keynote Speaker

Title: Is bitcoin suitable as a research topic?

Abstract:

Bitcoin has emerged as the most successful crypto currency since its appearance back in 2009. Besides its security robustness, two main properties have probably been its key to success: anonymity and decentralization. In this talk, we provide a detailed description of the bitcoin protocol and we explain how its security robustness is achieved through its P2P network and suitable cryptographic tools. We also analyze which anonymity degree can be effectively obtained when dealing with bitcoins. Finally, we discuss some research challenges that bitcoin faces and some opportunities around the bitcoin ecosystem for funding such type of research.

Short biography: Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí is associate professor at Department of Information and Communications Engineering in the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). He finished a graduate in Mathematics at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 1994 and he received his Ph.D. degree in 2000 from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. His research interests include topics in the field of privacy and computer security and more precisely the bitcoin ecosystem, mobile crowdsensing scenarios and privacy in Online Social Networks. He has advised different PhD thesis and has acted as a Principal Investigator in several research projects. He has coauthored over 90 research papers in both national and international publications, the vast majority indexed in relevant research indexes, like ISI-JCR, ISI-WoK, SCOPUS or DBLP. He regularly acts as a peer reviewer for several important journals and as an external reviewer for the European Commission in the Framework Research Program as well as for the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education.