Above: Shiva Bissesar

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has established a cross-disciplinary Blockchain Research and Application session across the three conferences within the upcoming 2018 World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI), 8-13 July 2018, Rio de Janero, Brazil.

The aim and scope of the session is described as providing “a forum for researchers in this area to carefully analyze current systems or propose new ones, in order to create a scientific background for a solid development of new blockchain technology systems.”

There will be two tracks within this session:

• Theoretical and Empirical Studies and Engineering Applications

• Initial Token Offering / Initial Coin Offering Solutions

It is expected that papers accepted for the Blockchain Session will be published in the IEEE Proceedings of 2018 IJCNN, and will be available after July 2018 at ieeexplore.ieee.org.

Joining other distinguished members of the program committee is a Caribbean expert, Mr Shiva Bissessar, who has made consistent contributions to the Caribbean in the field of blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).

In 2013, he commenced his work in this area with technical research via his M.Sc. Information Security thesis (University College London) which examined Bitcoin transactions flows.

Then in 2014 he began socio-economic research into the opportunities and risks with the advent of digital currency in the Caribbean via the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). This research was published in 2016 as one of the first U.N. publications on this topic.

Later in 2016, and again in 2017, he worked with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to develop capacity building in Digital Financial Services for key Caribbean stakeholders including financial and telecommunications regulators, senior Government policy makers and entrepreneurs.

In 2017 he continued his contributions towards regional development in this area by becoming a member of the Caribbean Telecommunication Union (CTU) working group on digital currency and assisted the ITU further by becoming part of the focus group on Digital Fiat Currency (DFC).  He also serves as a founding director of the Caribbean Blockchain Association.

His commercial experience extends to assisting Caribbean fintech and telecommunications entities in their strategy development towards enabling commercial digital financial services and he is currently working with other Caribbean entities on projects examining how blockchain technology can be leveraged towards solving longstanding Caribbean challenges.

We certainly look forward to further positive contributions from Mr. Bissessar in this sphere as he continues to represent the Caribbean on a global stage.