Bringing together the key players in blockchain and DLT (distribute ledger technologies), the CBC 2021 Blockchain conference is a peer-reviewed, online conference hosted by the Construction Blockchain Consortium. During the three-day event, UCL School of Management’s Niall Roche and Alastair Moore presented their work and chaired panel discussions on Smart Legal Contracts.
The conference offers a forum for participants to learn about the latest technological developments of Industry 4.0 that are driving real transformations across the world and engage with industry experts and academics working in this area.
Nial and Alastair are members of the CBC and CBT (UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies) and have both presented previously at CBC and helped to run workshops and hackathons. This year they were invited to speak at the conference where Niall Roche presented a session on his work with Smart Legal Contracts and Oracles followed by a panel discussion chaired by Alastair Moore.
Their talk “Smart Legal Contracts and Oracles”, covered their work on software implementations and outlined some of their key findings such as; the use of a first-party oracle approach towards sourcing and processing external data for delivery to contracts is a more risk-averse approach and transparent than alternatives using third party oracles which have issues with financial predictability and self-serving motivations.
They discussed the process and benefits of developing a framework for Smart Legal Contracts that are capable of processing external complex events such as restrictions related to events such as COVID-19 and explored the use of Machine learning and Natural Processing as part of a diverse set of data extraction techniques where APIs to access unstructured data do not exist.
When asked if he believes conferences such as these are important to the field, Niall Roche said “Absolutely, these are a great way to see developments in a specific niche area and also to get willing collaborators and domain experts to build open-source solutions to address some of the issues that the industry is facing and to drive innovation”.
You can learn more about Niall and Alistair’s work in their paper Oraclised Data Schemas: Improving contractual certainty in uncertain times.
