Is Supply Chain Management A Killer App for Blockchain?

Abstract

The 2008 article - Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System - by Satoshi Nakamoto has started a new technology and a worldwide phenomenon called blockchain.  Now, every major country in the world has been pouring resources into blockchain applications, so have all major companies in the world.  This week, Hyperledger, part of the Linux Foundation just announced an enterprise blockchain project, Hyperledger Grid, which is a framework for supply chain blockchains. The main sponsors are agribusiness company Cargill and chip maker Intel. This is the first hyperledger project for a particular industry, i.e., supply chain management.  In this talk, the speaker will first give an overview of blockchain concepts and then focus on Hyperledger Grid and its applications in supply chain management.  The talk will discuss research directions on Blockchain based supply chain management.

Biography

J. Leon Zhao (Ph.D. in Business Administration, University of California at Berkeley) is Chair Professor in Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong. He was Head of Information Systems of CityU from 2009 to 2015. Before joining City University of Hong Kong, he was an Interim Head and Eller Professor in Management Information Systems, University of Arizona . His research is on information technology and management, with focus on collaboration and workflow technologies and business information services. He is director of Center on Global Internet Finance and Lab on Enterprise Process Innovation and Computing funded by NSF, RGC, SAP, and IBM among other sponsors. He was awarded an IBM Faculty Award in 2005 and Chang Jiang Scholar Chair Professorship at Tsinghua University in 2009.