Tallinna Tehnikaülikool

4th Workshop on Blockchains for Inter-Organizational Collaboration (BIOC’21)
held in conjunction with MEDI2021 (https://cs.ttu.ee/events/medi2021/)

  • Assoc. Prof. Dr Alex Norta: alexander.norta@taltech.ee
    Department of Software Science, Tallinn University of Technology,
    Akadeemia Tee 15a, 12618 Tallinn, Estonia.
  • Prof. Anne Laurent: anne.laurent@lirmm.fr
    LIRMM, Univ Montpellier, CNRS, Montpellier, France
  • Assoc. Prof. Dr Arnaud Castelltort: castelltort@lirmm.fr
    LIRMM, Univ Montpellier, CNRS, Montpellier, France
  • Assoc. Prof. Dr Akram Hakiri: akram.hakiri@enit.utm.tn
    University of Carthage, SYSCOM ENIT, ISSAT Mateur, Tunisia

Theme and Goals

This paper-oriented workshop scientifically addresses recent research efforts in the field of blockchain technology use for cross-organizational collaboration. The workshop focuses on the application of information and communication technology in order to enable organizational and governmental service provisions. The resulting technology-mediated processes are changing the delivery of private- and public services as well as the broader interactions between citizens, governments and organizations. More and more countries are considering e-governance solutions as a tool to improve the efficiency and transparency of their services. However, there exists a gap of understanding the support of trust and reputation via blockchain solutions that allow for immutable event traceability. The workshop aims for exploring systematic approaches for developing and interrelating blockchain-technology supported services, as well as increasing issues concerning blockchain-tech, enabled security and privacy of personal data use. In addition, technological advances in the field of big data analysis, blockchains for distributed application deployment, smart contracts, the Internet-of-Things, agent technologies, etc., offer new research directions in the blockchain-technology space for further improvements of existing solutions.

The goal of this workshop is to promote, establish and speed up blockchain-technology related research, and identify future research questions. Contributions should focus on clearly stated research questions covering the topics mentioned below.

The topics of interest for blockchain-technology research papers include, but are not limited to:

  • Security and Privacy Management of e-Governance Systems
  • (Smart) Government
  • E-Voting
  • Governmental Decision-making
  • E-Business
  • E-Tax
  • E-Health
  • Autonomous e-commerce
  • Identity and Identification Systems
  • Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)
  • Self-Aware Contracts as well as AI and Smart Contracts
  • Open and Big Data with blockchain technology
  • Interoperability
  • Medical supply chain
  • Crowdfunding
  • Self-organizing and Evolutionary e-governance
  • Collaboration Models
  • Legal Aspects of blockchain technology
  • Benchmarks and Evaluation Strategies for blockchain e-governance Systems
  • Economics of blockchain e-governance
  • Case Studies for blockchain-based distributed applications deployment
  • Blockchain business models for Data aggregation
  • Consortium Blockchain Data Aggregation
  • Federated and Consortium blockchains
  • Blockchain Model and Data Engineering
  • Blockchain Support for Collaborative Business Processes
  • Collaborative Internet-of-Things Services for Business
  • Collaborative Smart Contracts for Enterprises Digital Identities
  • Data Management in Consortium blockchains
  • Integrated Engineering Blockchain Consortium
  • Modeling Tools and Techniques for Co-Operated Consortium Blockchain
  • blockchain-as-a-service (baas) for business

Keynote Speakers

Yuhong Liu

Ass. Prof. Yuhong Liu, Santa Clara University, CA, USA

Yuhong Liu, Associate Professor at Department of Computer Engineering Santa Clara University, received her B.S. and M.S. degree from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2004 and 2007 respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from University of Rhode Island in 2012. She is the recipient of the 2019 Researcher of the Year Award at School of Engineering, Santa Clara University, and the 2013 University of Rhode Island Graduate School Excellence in Doctoral Research Award.
Her research interests include trustworthy computing and cyber security of emerging applications, such as Internet-of-things, Blockchain and online social media. She has published over 60 papers on prestigious journals and peer reviewed conferences. Her papers have been selected as the best paper at the IEEE International Conference on Social Computing 2010 (acceptance rate = 13%) and the 9th International Conference on Ubi-Media Computing (UMEDIA 2016).
She is actively contributing to professional societies including IEEE and Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA). She has contributed as an organizing committee member for over 10 international conferences and a TPC member for over 20 conferences. She is currently serving as the IEEE Computer Society Region 6 Area 4 coordinator, a member of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Meeting Request Committee, a member of the Multimedia Security and Forensics (MSF) TC for APSIPA, and an APSIPA Distinguished Lecturer (2021-2022).

Eugen Luft, IBM Blockchain Garage Boeblingen, Stuttgart Area, Germany

Format of the Workshop

BIOC’21 is intended to be a full-day virtual and online workshop divided into three sessions in which around 6-8 full and 2 short scientific papers will be presented. Full papers will have a time slot reserved of 30 minutes (20 minutes for the presentation and 10 minutes for questions and discussions), and short papers will have a time slot of 15 minutes (10 minutes for the presentation and 5 minutes for questions and discussions). In addition, we plan to have a keynote speech held by an acknowledged expert in the field of blockchain technology in inter-organizational collaboration.

Important Dates

Paper submission: EXTENDED!  March 31st April 18th, 2021 (at midnight UTC)
Acceptance notification:   May 15th, 2021
Camera-ready:   June 9th, 2021
Workshop:   June 21st, 2021

Submission and Publication

Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research papers. Papers must be written in English and strictly following Springer LNCS style. For formatting instructions and templates, please see the Springer Web page: https://www.springer.com/fr/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines

Three types of submissions are accepted:

  • Regular Research papers: contributions should describe original work (up to 14 pages including all text, figures, references and appendices).
  • Industrial case studies and lessons learned papers: works with experiences and notable industrial advances using model-driven engineering technology for verification and testing purposes (6- 10 pages including all text, figures, references and appendices).
  • Short Papers and position papers: ​Research in progress, tools presentations, and new ideas ​(6 - 8 pages including all text, figures, references and appendices).

Papers must be submitted in PDF format via the electronic submission system that is available at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bioc21

Submitted papers will be evaluated according to their rigour, significance, originality, technical quality and exposition, by at least three distinct members of an international program committee.

At least one author of each accepted paper must register and participate in the workshop. Registration is subject to the terms, conditions and procedures of the main MEDI’21 conference to be found at its website: https://cs.ttu.ee/events/medi2021/

Organizers’ Short Bios

Alex Norta is currently a research member in the Next Gen Digital State Research Group at the Department of Software Science of Tallinn University of Technology and was earlier a researcher at the Oulu University Secure-Programming Group (OUSPG) after having been a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He received his M.Sc. degree (2001) from the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria and his PhD degree (2007) from the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. His PhD thesis was partly financed by the IST project CrossWork, in which he focused on developing the eSourcing concept for dynamic inter-organizational business process collaboration. His research interests include business-process collaboration, workflow management, e-business transactions, service-oriented computing, software architectures and software engineering, ontologies, mashups, social web. At the IEEE EDOC’12-conference, Alex won the best-paper award for his full research paper with the title “Inter-enterprise business transaction management in open service ecosystems”. For the blockchain-tech startups Qtum.org, Agrello.org and Everex.io, Alex has worked on their respective whitepapers. Alex also serves as an advisor for several other blockchain-tech startups such as Cashaa and RecordGram.

Akram Hakiri is an associate professor of Computer Sciences and Engineering at the University of Carthage, and a research scientist at SYSCOM Labs’ ENIT, both in Tunisia. He was a senior scientist and researcher at LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France, and a visiting research scientist at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA. Dr. Hakiri was also visiting research scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India and the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, Romania, and Santa Clara University, California, USA. Dr. Hakiri is an IEEE Senior Member, ACM Professional Member, and the Vice-Chair of the IEEE COM NetSoft SDN MCM P1930.1 standardization project. His current research focuses on developing novel solutions to emerging challenges in distributed systems, Blockchain and distributed consensus, distributed ledgers, network virtualization, software defined networking.

Anne Laurent is Full Professor at the LIRMM lab. She received his M.Sc. degree (1999) from the University Paris 5, France and her PhD degree (2002) from University Paris 6 Pierre et Marie Curie, now Sorbonne University.
As a member of the FADO Research group, Anne Laurent works on semantic web, data mining, gradual pattern mining, both for trends and exceptions detections and is particularly interested in the study of the use of fuzzy logic to provide more valuable results, while remaining scalable. She is currently Vice-President of the University of Montpellier Delegated to Open Science and Research Data. Her interest for blockchain is focused on the links with big data, imprecision, and parsimonious data storage.

Arnaud Castelltort is an associate professor at University of Montpellier, France since Sept. 2017. He is a member of the LIRMM lab within the FADO team. His research lies in the fields of property graphs and how to exploit them in the context of databases, web semantics, ontologies, AI and Big Data.
His interest in blockchain is focused on emerging challenges and blockchain techniques and systems in the field of data exploration and analysis, data storage and modeling and behavior detection.

Program Committee

Chairs

Members