Ripple’s successful collaboration with the academic community, UBRI (University Blockchain Research Initiative), on discussion with Prof. R.K. Shyamasundar of IIT Bombay gives us a sense of how advanced the works and programs involving blockchains are, within the campus.
He further elucidates the importance of blockchains in the business world and how the upcoming generation of entrepreneurs should have a well-defined knowledge and hands-on exposure in the blockchain related areas.
The success of blockchain in the data and payment ecosystem has made it evident that countless blockchain applications are bound to spring up in the near future, and the students must be equipped and trained effectively in projects revolving around blockchain to easily adapt and grow.
He says that the university’s Centres for Economic Policy and Centre for Alternative Technologies for Rural Applications have started to incline towards using UBRI to aptly utilize blockchain for their respective requirements.
In light of the recently hosted workshop by IIT Bombay, Professor Shyamasundar explains how the university has been the centre of interest for regional stakeholders concerning blockchain.
In this workshop, a number of papers were presented by people from reputed blockchain organizations and discussed upon, thus acting as a hub for students and seniors to collaboratively put their ideas together to cultivate mutual learning. The university has also begun developing blockchain collaborations with renowned Australia Universities like CSIRO.
Some of the topics of interest of the faculty include theoretical foundations on scalability & performance tradeoffs, concurrent operations, permissioned ledgers and DLTs., robust smart contracts, security, privacy, anonymity, cryptocurrency and crypto-assets, DLT applications to land management, healthcare, IoT security and many more.
UBRI allows IIT Bombay to use it’s own XRP Validator on campus to facilitate hands-on learning and effectuate proper exposure of students to blockchain principles.
Prof. R.K. Shyamasundar is all the more enthused over this. Students are streaming to develop projects involving AI or Machine Learning for applications in healthcare, land management and financial aids using Bitcoin, XRP Ledger Consensus Protocols, and many such.
He also mentions an effort to assess the possibilities of digital transfer of assets using XRP and would like to collaborate with fintech and government partners for UBRI-funded research in the future. This is to ensure that by partnering with private and government organizations, the students have a fairly easy path to emerge as an entrepreneur.
IIT-B became one of the 17 universities across the world to benefit from the $50-million Ripple fund for its global University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI).
Ripple’s idea is to basically ‘create the next generation of students and entrepreneurs’ as quoted by Navin Gupta, managing director, Ripple. Though people are anxious about the cost-benefit balance of sharing their data, Prof. Shyamasundar is optimistic about blockchain being able to bring consistency to the collection and use of data. He also strongly believes in students being able to involve in such challenging prospects of blockchain in the future.
Credits:- Anirudhh Sai