School of Social and Political Science

Description

Part of the Controversies in the Data Society 2025 series
A cross-disciplinary series of public lectures and discussion on AI and the datafication of society

Blockchain and distributed information systems where trust is ensured by mathematics and not human institutions is one of the more radical ways that computers could be used to support changes in fundamental social processes and institutions. We are all familiar with digital assets such as Bitcoin, and their associated controversies, but there are many more ambitious programmes that aim to exploit the potential for openness and transparency in blockchain technology that could used to change other institutions, including  in governance and democracy. 

In this session, we hear from two scholars, Dr Morshed Mannan, newly appointed in Edinburgh Law School, and author of Blockchain Governance, and  Professor Aggelos Kiayias, Chair in Cyber Security and Privacy, director of the Blockchain Technology Laboratory, and Chief Scientist of IOHK, the developer of one of the first and most ambitious blockchain platforms, Cardano.

Speakers

Dr Morshed Mannan

Lecturer in Global Law and Digital Technologies, Edinburgh Law School

Staff profile

Dr Morshed Mannan is a Lecturer in Global Law and Digital Technologies at Edinburgh Law School. He was previously a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute, where he was part of the BlockchainGov ERC project. His research focuses on blockchain governance and cooperative governance. In addition to his several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these topics, his latest co-authored book Blockchain Governance was published by the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series (August 2024). Morshed is a Research Affiliate of the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy at The New School in New York City. He is enrolled as an Advocate by the Bangladesh Bar Council, and has been called to the Bar of England & Wales.

Prof Aggelos Kiayias

Chair in Cyber Security and Privacy

Aggelos Kiayias FRSE is chair in Cyber Security and Privacy and director of the Blockchain Technology Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh. He is also the Chief Scientist at blockchain technology company IOHK. His research interests are in computer security, information security, applied cryptography and foundations of cryptography with a particular emphasis in blockchain technologies and distributed systems, e-voting and secure multiparty protocols as well as privacy and identity management. His research has been funded by the Horizon 2020 programme (EU), the European Research Council (EU), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK), the Secretariat of Research and Technology (Greece), the National Science Foundation (USA), the Department of Homeland Security (USA), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA). He has received an ERC Starting Grant, a Marie Curie fellowship, an NSF Career Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship. He holds a PhD. from the City University of New York and he is a graduate of the Mathematics department of the University of Athens. He has over 100 publications in journals and conference proceedings in the area. He has served as the programme chair of the Cryptographers’ Track of the RSA conference in 2011 and the Financial Cryptography and Data Security Conference in 2017, as well as the general chair of Eurocrypt 2013. He also served as the programme chair of Real World Crypto Symposium 2020 and the Public-Key Cryptography Conference 2020. In 2021 he was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

https://kiayias.com/Aggelos_Kiayias/Home_of_Aggelos_Kiayias.html 

Recommended reading

Kiayias, A, Lazos, P. (2022) SoK: Blockchain Governance. In 4th ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT ’22), September 19–21, 2022, Cambridge, MA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA. https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.07188  

The Institute of Engineering and Technology (2020) Internet Voting in the UK: The Issues, Challenges, and Risks around Internet Voting. IET: London. https://www.theiet.org/media/9537/internet-voting-inthe- uk.pdf