IIT Madras joins Hedera Governing Council to drive R&D in new blockchain use cases

Indian Institute of Technology Madras and Hedera Hashgraph, an enterprise-grade public network for the decentralized economy announced the former's entry into its Governing Council. The globally-renowned technology university joins a rotating council of up to 39 global organizations that are from a diverse array of industries and geographies, and each runs an initial network node that enables the decentralized governance model for the Hedera public ledger.

As a newly appointed member of the Hedera Governing Council, IIT Madras will work closely with the Hedera ecosystem to advance its technical education, research, and innovation offerings in distributed ledger technology. IIT Madras will also use its term on the Hedera Council to ramp up its R&D efforts in the DLT space, testing use cases leveraging key services, such as the Hedera Consensus Service and the Hedera Token Service.

Speaking about this collaboration, said Prof. Prabhu Rajagopal Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Madras, who leads Remote Diagnostics at IIT Madras’ Center for Nondestructive Evaluation (CNDE), said, “We have identified enormous potential in Hedera Hashgraph, already the most used, and sustainable public ledgers on the market today, and we look forward to utilising the Hedera Consensus and Token Services to study potentially ground-breaking new use cases. IIT Madras is recognised globally for pioneering work in areas such as renewable energy, telecommunications, non-destructive testing, biomedicine, healthcare and information and communication technologies (ICT), and its renowned tech alumni community.”

Further, Prof. Prabhu Rajagopal said, “With this network, we aim to bring substantial value to the Hedera Governing Council, utilising our expertise in practical and innovative technological solutions to assist other council members and organizations in use case development. I am particularly enthused by the opportunity to test and scale our solutions in blockchain backed information systems in healthcare, industry and digital media.”

Prof. Rajagopal’s group is interested in the securitization of large scale digital data-sets arising from sensor logs, which was the initial catalyst for their interest in blockchain and distributed ledgers.

IIT has established research expertise in DLT, served as an incubator for India’s National Blockchain Project, and most recently, developed 'BlockTrack', a first-of-its-kind blockchain-based secure medical data and information exchange mobile application for use by both medical providers and patients. BlockTrack aims to securely digitize healthcare information systems while protecting sensitive medical records by decentralizing the control and ownership of patient data, and is currently being field-tested at IIT Madras Institute Hospital.

“The addition of IITM to the Hedera Governing Council is a significant and exciting development for the Hedera community and the wider DLT industry. Throughout the history of IIT, its alumni and academic staff have made substantial contributions to groundbreaking research in technology and innovation. This brings enormous value to the Hedera Council and will undoubtedly guide the development of critical use cases built on the Hedera network. Combined with the appointment of LSE, and the ongoing work being done by University College London (UCL), this marks another remarkable step forward for the relationship between academia and the decentralized economy,” said Mance Harmon, CEO and Co-founder of Hedera Hashgraph.