2019-11-27 Review of IBM Blockchain Workshop
Review - IBM Blockchain Workshop - Wednesday 27 November 10:00am to 5:00pm
Room PM04 (Postgraduate and CPD Centre)
Speaker: Matt Lucas, Blockchain Global Engagement at IBM
This event was organised by the University of Bedfordshire CST School together with the BCS Student Chapter / Beds Computing SU Society
On Wednesday, 27 November the CST School was privileged to once again welcome
IBM’s Matt Lucas, Blockchain Global Engagement, to share his in-depth
knowledge, and practical experience of Blockchain technology.
If you want to learn about Blockchain then you could not have afforded to miss this event.
IBM’s Matt Lucas, Global Blockchain Engagement held a very successful, well attended all-day theoretical and hands-on workshop.
Blockchain technical skills are in high demand, with the World Economic Forum predicting that 10% of global GDP will be stored on blockchains or blockchain related technology by 2025. It is rare for a technology to have interest from the C-suite to the developer community.
Matt Lucas from IBM’s blockchain team returned for another year to hold an
all-day technical workshop telling you what you need to know.
Blockchain is a shared, replicated ledger that underpins technology such as Bitcoin. Blockchain's reach is far wider than cryptocurrency however, as it sets out to provide the foundation for a new generation of transactional applications that establish trust and transparency, while streamlining business processes.
Are you curious about Blockchain and what it can do? In this one-day workshop students learned the essentials of blockchain:
- Blockchain Explained: What blockchain (distributed ledger technology) is and why it is important
- Blockchain Technologies: Comparing blockchain technologies (ie. Ethereum, Bitcoin, Hyperledger Fabric)
- Blockchain Technical Concepts: The technical concepts of blockchain: data structures and algorithms
- Blockchain Software Engineering: Building your first application and deploying your first network
The workshop targeted students with a technical background since it built on
basic computer science concepts and included basic programming in JavaScript,
knowledge of which was desirable but not essential.
The workshop focused on the use of distributed ledgers in business scenarios, and thus took into account the various privacy and confidentiality requirements that organisations face, and the various other regulatory frameworks that govern business today.
About the lecturer:
Matt Lucas is part of IBM’s global blockchain team. His role is to help people understand and apply blockchain technologies and works closely with emerging blockchain fabrics such as Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. He is based in IBM’s development laboratory in Hursley and has worked with IBM for 20 years on a variety of integration middleware technologies. Matt is also an advisor for the British Blockchain Association and an associate lecturer at the University of Oxford.
Feedback from students was very positive:
“I found the workshop extremely useful and the speaker really informative.”
“There was a lot of content and lot to take in. It is a growing area of interest for most people and trying to understand the technology can be hard. However, I went away with a really good understanding of the technology and how it can help me.”
“The workshop was very interesting, informative and intellectually stimulating. The time spent was very well invested. I plan to explore it in more detail relevant to job roles availability.”