Colloquium: Prof. John E. Savage
Thursday, 8th March 2018, at 16.15 - 17.30
ETH Zurich, UNO B 11, Universitätstrasse 41
Blockchain Governance, Lessons Learned from Internet Governance
New technologies of broad social impact invariably have unintended consequences that introduce new governance issues. Blockchain technology, which has become a popular solution to many problems, is such a technology. For example, in June 2016 misformed smart contracts resulted in the theft of about $50 million from the DAO. Similarly, as demands grow for editable blockchains to allow for correction of transactions, an authoritative superstructure will be needed that will change the unsupervised nature of permissionless blockchains that prevail today. In both cases a new set of governance issues will emerge.
In this talk we provide an introduction to governance issues arising from the use of blockchain technologies and apply relevant experience acquired with Internet governance.
About Prof. John E. Savage
Dr. John E. Savage is the An Wang Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. He joined Bell Laboratories in 1965 after earning his PhD in Electrical Engineering at MIT. He moved to Brown University in 1967 where in 1979 he cofounded the Department of Computer Science at Brown, serving as its second chair from 1985 to 1991. He has served Brown in many capacities including as Chair of the Faculty Executive Committee and Chair of the 2002-2003 Task Force on Faculty Governance. He was a member of the MIT Corporation Visiting Committee for EECS from 1991-2002. In 2011 he gave testimony on cyber security before the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism of the United States Senate.
He has done research on coding and communication theory, theoretical computer science, VLSI theory, silicon compilation, scientific computing, computational nanotechnology, the performance of multicore chips, reliable computing with unreliable elements, and
cyber security policy.
He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of AAAS and ACM, and a Life Fellow of IEEE. He served as Jefferson Science Fellow in the U.S. Department of State in 2009-2010. He is a Professorial Fellow at the EastWest Institute, a member of the Board of the Michael Dukakis Institute, and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Verified Voting Foundation.
You can read a Summary of the talk on ISTP News.