IEEE holds blockchain-related cloud computing conference at Oxford University

The largest and oldest organization for computer professionals will begin its annual conference tomorrow on the future of mobile cloud computing, and blockchain will be one of the focuses.

With more than 421,000 members in 160 countries, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has the potential to accelerate blockchain’s entry into the engineering world.

The IEEE will host five blockchain workshops at the 702-year-old Oxford College in Exeter during the four-day conference that begins Tuesday. The conference, the organization’s fourth annual event, will focus on mobile cloud computing services and engineering.

During the conference, Professor Wei-Tek Tsai of Information and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University said that discussing the future of blockchain technology will be one of the research topics.

The transformation of computing

While this is the first time that an IEEE conference has given blockchain such an emphasis, it is not surprising given the conference’s focus on cloud computing.

In 2016, many people will stop talking about Bitcoin as a decentralized ledger and start talking about it as a database. Last month, IBM made big news. Many news reports said that IBM will provide a series of innovative applications of blockchain.

Also in November, Microsoft coined the term blockchain as a service (BaaS) to describe a sandbox environment for developers to experiment with tools on its Azure cloud platform.

Many companies, including ConsenSys, Augur, BitShares and Slock.it, have also joined the development of blockchain applications.