IoT, Smart Cities, and the Power of a Decentralized Data Economy

As part of Innovate Pasadena's Connect Week, this month we are moving locations to CTRL Collective's new Pasadena campus!

IoT, smart cities, and various other technological innovations rely heavily on data to function. While current data markets are difficult to navigate and often centrally siloed, it is important to create more decentralized data economy to supply data for various applications and industries, and blockchain technologies can play a significant role in this.

In this month's meetup, Dr. Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and Director of the Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things, will discuss efforts at USC focused on exploring decentralized markets motivated by the emergence of IoT applications for smart cities. He will present I3, an open source community marketplace platform for IoT data being backed by a public-private consortium including the City of LA and several companies. He will also describe ongoing research efforts leveraging blockchain technologies, including a client-server application layer protocol called SDPP for streaming data with payments and its integration with a decentralized marketplace application for sellers to post data products and buyers to find them, a double deposit escrow mechanism for buying and selling digital goods with provable guarantees, and a game theoretic analysis of the recently introduced idea of token curated registries.

As part of Innovate Pasadena's Connect Week, our featured project this month feature local Pasadena AI company ObEN, discussing recent advancements in their Personal AI technology and how they are reimagining AI on the Blockchain.

Schedule:
Doors open 6:30pm
Networking 6:30-7:00PM
Presentations and Q&A: 7:00-8:30

Spaces fill up fast, so sign up soon to secure your spot!

Sponsored by Innovate Pasadena and CTRL Collective

About Bhaskar

Bhaskar Krishnamachari is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (by joint appointment) at the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California. He is Director of the USC Viterbi Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things (CCI). He has expertise in wireless networks, IoT protocols and applications, distributed computing, machine learning, and blockchain technologies, spanning both theory and software systems. He has co-authored over 300 papers, collectively cited more than 24000 times (per Google Scholar). He has received the NSF CAREER Award and the ASEE Terman Award for outstanding electrical and computer engineering educators. In 2011, he was listed in MIT technology review magazine’s TR-35 list of top 35 innovators under the age of 35, and in 2015 was named one of Popular Science magazine’s “Brilliant 10”.

About Mark

Dr. Mark Harvilla earned his Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) in 2010 and his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 2014, all in Electrical and Computer Engineering. During his doctoral studies at CMU, Dr. Harvilla specialized in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) research. Dr. Harvilla joined ObEN as its first employee in January 2015 and became a Project PAI Core Committer over 1 year ago. He has since worked in a variety of areas at ObEN and Project PAI, including voice conversion, machine learning, singing synthesis, and most recently, blockchain consensus mechanism research. He currently leads the technology development as Chief Engineer at ObEN.