Pietro Ferraro of Imperial College London Joins IOTA Foundation

IOTA Furthers Academic Collaboration with Imperial College London

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TL;DR:


The IOTA Foundation’s mission to develop strong ties to the international academic community continues with the recent hire of a leading researcher at Imperial College London. This is in addition to the announcement of a £1 million philanthropic grant from the IOTA Foundation to Imperial College to explore how DLT can promote the circular economy.

The IOTA Foundation is committed to developing ties between the research community and distributed ledger technology, particularly by engaging leading academics in the research and development of the IOTA protocol. Recently, we awarded a £1 million philanthropic grant to Imperial College London to explore how DLT can promote the circular economy. Imperial College London is a public research university ranked 12th in the world by the 2022 Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

We are also delighted to announce the appointment of Imperial College London’s Dr. Pietro Ferraro, who last September joined our team working on identity, chronicle nodes and the IOTA smart contracts protocol. Dr. Ferraro is responsible for developing second-layer applications at the IOTA Foundation.

This is a part-time role, therefore Dr. Ferraro maintains his position teaching and conducting research at Imperial College London.

The IOTA Foundation has previously funded grant work for Imperial College London’s Professor Robert Shorten, and Dr. Ferraro is highly familiar with IOTA through his participation in this grant as a postdoc with Professor Shorten. Dr. Ferraro helped develop the IOTA Congestion Control algorithm and is co-author of several published works on IOTA, including a recent journal article on IOTA access control.

On joining the IOTA Foundation, Dr. Ferraro said:

“My passion for math, control theory and engineering, combined with my interest in fairness and social equity has led me to focus my research on the broad domain of the sharing economy. By trying to solve problems in this area I discovered IOTA and became immediately fascinated by its mathematical elegance and the potential applications that the Tangle might provide to the sharing economy. I am very excited to join the Foundation as a research scientist and to have the opportunity to explore second layer applications based on the IOTA protocol.”

We are very pleased to have Dr. Ferraro on our team. Dr. Ferraro is in a great position to further IOTA’s research into second layer solutions because of his background in the core IOTA 2.0 protocol which he gained through his previous grant work. He joins our teams working on identity, chronicle nodes, the IOTA smart contracts protocol, and more.

Other examples of the IOTA Foundation’s work with Imperial College London include funding of research by Aida Manzano Kharman Ph.D. into how distributed ledger technology solutions enable a fair data market, preserving data privacy and ensuring fair data ownership. Funding is also provided for the Ph.D. scholarship of Lianna Zhao, who is researching applications of distributed ledger technology including the Internet of Things as well as smart cities. Furthermore, past funding provided support for Ph.D. student Andrew Cullen, who helped develop the IOTA Congestion Control algorithm.  

Thanks for following the developments at IOTA Research. If you’d like to connect with our team, you can find our team members in the #tanglemath channel on our Discord. You are also welcome to follow and participate in our technical discussions on our public forum: IOTA.cafe.

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