One of the largest and oldest organizations for computing professionals will kick off its annual conference on the future of mobile cloud computing tomorrow, where blockchain is scheduled to be one of the attractions.
With more than 421,000 members in 160 countries, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) holding such a high-profile event has the potential to accelerate the rate of blockchain adoption by the engineering community.
At the four-day conference, beginning Tuesday, the IEEE will host five blockchain seminars at the 702-year-old Exeter College of Oxford. The conference, IEEE Mobile Cloud 2016, is the organization’s fourth annual event dedicated to mobile cloud computing services and engineering.
Speaking at the event, hosted at Oxford University, professor Wei-Tek Tsai of the School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems engineering at Arizona State University will talk about the future of blockchain technology as an academic topic of research.
Computing shift
While this looks to be the first IEEE conference to deal so closely with blockchain, its presence at an event dedicated to cloud computing is no surprise.
2016 is shaping up to be the year many stopped talking about bitcoin as a decentralized ledger and started talking about it as a database. Last month, IBM made a huge splash in the blockchain ecosystem when it announced among a wide range of other news, that it would be offering a wide range of blockchain-related initiatives.
Further, in November, Microsoft coined the term Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) to describe its sandbox environment where developers could experiment with tools hosted on the company’s Azure Cloud platform.
Companies including ConsenSys, Augur, BitShares and Slock.it have joined that effort.
Oxford University via Shutterstock