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Online Seminar | Filecoin: A Decentralised Data Storage and Delivery Market

03 March 2021, 11:30 am–12:30 pm

Boxes connected by networked vectors and nodes

With the vast majority of internet services operating under a centralised model Ioannis Psaras, Research Scientist at Protocol Labs, will discuss the emergence of the first decentralised storage network, the technologies underpinning the network and explore the value propositions created by such a network

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All | UCL staff | UCL students

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Robert Thompson – Institute of Communications and Connected Systems

Filecoin: A Decentralised Data Storage and Delivery Market

The vast majority of the Internet services we use today operate under a centralised model, meaning that one entity has full control over the system’s operation and performance. Such services include Internet connectivity, data storage, as well as data delivery platforms. This is a risky approach for several reasons: it leads to reduced security, single points of failure, opportunities for manipulation by rogue actors (e.g., oppressive states), or giant monopolies that dominate market trends.

In lack of any alternative, data storage services, in particular, have been increasingly centralised in the last few decades with very few, very large players dominating the landscape.

In 2020 this changed.

Filecoin is the first of its kind decentralised storage network, where any user can join and contribute storage capacity to the peer-to-peer network. The blockchain that supports the Filecoin network integrates all the required proofs to ensure that no one misbehaves, deletes or provides corrupt copies of the data to users. Storage providers are rewarded for their service and the market dynamics guarantee that the system is profitable for those contributing to it.

In this talk we will go through the main technologies underpining the Filecoin Network and discuss some of its high-level operational properties and value propositions.

ICCS Chair

This session will be chaired by: Izzat Darwazeh


Attending the seminar 

The Seminar will be held on the Zoom platform. Details of how to access Zoom can be found on their website.

Please click this URL to join. Zoom Webinar
Webinar ID: 945 4301 0305
Password: Will be distributed to ICCS members, others are welcome to join and the password can be requested by email.

Request password

About the ICCS online seminar series

The ICCS seminar series is designed to bring together members of our community who are currently away from our home in Bloomsbury and distributed across the world. The Seminars are being curated to provide academic exploration and inspiration, offering insights into a range of topics surrounding communications and connected systems. Topics will either explore subjects close to the work of our academics or introduce wider concepts from experts in the global academic and industrial community.

If you wish to suggest a future topic or speaker please use the link below, speakers could be from academia, industry, within ICCS/UCL or from further a field.

Format 

The seminar will begin with a presentation aimed at a technical audience, but at a level that will be accessible to those from a range of engineering disciplines. Speakers have been asked to end their presentations with a technical challenge or delving deeper into the content to engage those more invested in the topic. 

The seminar series is designed to offer a compact exploration of ranging topics and is therefore short in format. The presentation will run for 15 - 30 minutes, followed by 15 minutes of questions.
 Suggest a topic or speaker

About the Speaker

Yiannis Psaras

Research Scientist at Protocol Labs

Dr Yiannis Psaras is a Research Scientist at Protocol Labs. He is heavily involved in identifying the future challenges for IPFS, libp2p and Filecoin, especially with regard to the limitations that current versions of the protocols are expected to face. He is part of the Resilient Networks Lab, which nucleates projects, funds external collaborators, develops prototypes and delivers solutions to long-term problems to the IPFS, libp2p and Filecoin engineering teams.

Before joining Protocol Labs, he was an EPSRC Fellow and University Lecturer at University College London. For the past decade he has been interested in resource management techniques for current and future networking architectures with particular focus on routing, caching and congestion control. Over the last few years he has focused on function-centric networks to realise distributed and decentralised edge computing, also referred to as “computing in the network”. He held a prestigious EPSRC Early Career Fellowship (2015-2020) in the area of “decentralized content-oriented and service-centric edge-computing architectures”. He has been heavily involved in the effort to shift the Internet towards a content-addressable, Information-Centric Networking environment, which he is now materializing through his contribution to the IPFS Ecosystem.

Dr. Psaras has received five (5) Best Paper Awards for his work and has attracted more than £2.5M in research funding to date from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC, UK), the EU FP7/H2020 framework programmes and from Innovate UK.

More about Yiannis Psaras