Keynote 1:  Blockchain
Tamás Blummer, Chief Ledger Architect, Digital Asset Holdings

Abstract: The financial industry strongly needs a solution which supports client-to-client technologies with no central agent. Such a distributed solution has to fulfill serious extra-functional requirements like security, timeliness and non-repudiation, forming the technology in all senses of the word to a reliable distributed system.

Blockchain is the popular name of the data structure used the Bitcoin network. It is an append-only transaction log with cryptographically secure consistency checks. The term blockchain is also often used to refer to the unique algorithm, the Nakamoto-Consensus, that Bitcoin uses to achieve convergence of distributed copies of the ledger to the same global state. Both the distributed ledger substantiated by the cryptographically secure transaction log and the consensus building algorithm are remarkable and forward-looking for the design of systems that feature a wholly new level of consistency, auditability of their data and trust-minimized execution of their algorithms.

The presenter: Tamás is the Chief Ledger Architect at Digital Asset Holdings, a technology company that builds distributed, encrypted straight through processing tools to improve efficiency, security, compliance and settlement speed. Tamás has 28 years of software development experience for financial institutions including Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley. He founded Bits of Proof, which was acquired by Digital Asset in 2015, and launched the first enterprise ready implementation of the blockchain technology in 2013. Bits of Proof built the first real-time audit-able exchange for institutional investors, the backend of the first hardware wallet for Bitcoin. Tamás also built the Bitcoin mining control software at CoinTerra.

Keynote 2:  Emergence in Cyber-Physical Systems-of-Systems
Andrea Bondavalli, Professor, University of Firenze

Abstract: The talk reports on the work done within the context of the AMADEOS project. It defines emergence and its basic concepts and mechanisms in the context of Systems of Systems. It presents some examples of emergence in Cyber-Physical Systems of Systems and concludes with some indications on managing detrimental emergence in Critical Systems of Systems.

Slides of the presentation: Emergence in Cyber-Physical Systems-of-Systems

The presenter: Andrea Bondavalli is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Firenze. Previously he has been a researcher and a senior researcher of the Italian National Research Council, working at the CNUCE Institute in Pisa. His research activity is focused on Dependability and Resilience. In particular he has been working on safety, security, fault tolerance, evaluation of attributes such as reliability, availability and performability. His scientific activities have originated more than 160 papers appeared in international Journals and Conferences. Andrea Bondavalli supports as an expert the European Commission in the selection and evaluation of project proposals and regularly consultes companies in the application field. Andrea Bondavalli led various national and European projects such as the European projects PDCS, PDCS-2, GUARDS, HIDE, CAUTION++, HIDENETS, CRUTIAL, SAFEDMI, AMBER and ALARP. Andrea Bondavalli participates to (and has been chairing) the program committee in several International Conferences such as IEEE FTCS, IEEE SRDS, EDCC, IEEE HASE, IEEE ISORC, IEEE ISADS, IEEE DSN. He is the chair of the Steering Committees of IEEE SRDS and a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Critical Computer-Based Systems.