Dallas, TX and Chennai, India – Hedera Hashgraph, the most used, sustainable, enterprise-grade public network for the decentralized economy, today announced the Indian Institutes of Technology Madras (IITM) as the newest member of 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, IITM will work closely with the Hedera ecosystem to advance its technical education, research, and innovation offerings in distributed ledger technology (DLT). IITM 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.
“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 groundbreaking new use cases. IITM is recognised globally for pioneering work in areas such as renewable energy, telecommunications, nondestructive testing, biomedicine, healthcare and information and communication technologies (ICT), and its renowned tech alumni community. 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,” said Prof. Prabhu Rajagopal who leads Remote Diagnostics at IITM’s Center for Nondestructive Evaluation (CNDE).
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.
IITM’s appointment to the Hedera Governing Council comes just weeks after the London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE), one of the UK’s top universities, announced its membership to the Hedera Governing Council, bolstering the council’s role within academia. Established in 1956, IITs (at Madras and several other Indian cities) count Google CEO Sundar Pichai and former president of the SoftBank Group, Nikesh Arora, among its alumni. Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and founder of Khosla Ventures, noted to CBS that, “The IITs probably are the hardest school in the world to get into, to the best of my knowledge”.
Regarded as one of the top universities in the world, 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.
ABOUT HEDERA HASHGRAPH
Hedera Hashgraph is the most used, sustainable, enterprise-grade public network for the decentralized economy. The platform is governed by a council of the world’s leading organizations, including Avery Dennison, Boeing, Chainlink Labs, Dentons, Deutsche Telekom, DLA Piper, EDF (Électricité de France), eftpos, FIS (WorldPay), Google, IBM, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), LG Electronics, The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Magalu, Nomura Holdings, Shinhan Bank, Standard Bank Group, Swirlds, Tata Communications, University College London (UCL), Wipro, and Zain Group.