American citizens must have an equal right to vote. Administration of elections is primarily state and local responsibility. Are you voted for the very first time or waited in line for a very long time? By the way, we have to fix that. Hi, welcome to High Turn Up White Margin. This is Brianna Lennon. I am the County Clerk from Green County, Missouri, and with me is my co-host, Eric Faye, Director of Elections in St. Louis County, Missouri. And we are really excited to talk to you today about our podcast, which is High Turn Up White Margin, but also how we've been trying to use it to fight misinformation with the nuts and bolts of elections administration over this past year. So at the end of last year, as we were going through the end of the 2020 election and election officials were feeling borne down and starved for contact other than Zoom meetings because we're used to having these really good conferences where we can share all this information, we can share best practices, and we can actually misery on what we've been going through. All of these news articles have been coming out about how much pressure we had all been under, how many people were leaving the profession, how we were going to help bring new people in. And yet at the same time, we hadn't really created a space in the digital world to try to share any of that information or talk about things that you can do in your own office to help make your job easier or more efficient or what's happening in neighboring states that you might benefit from if you brought it into your own jurisdiction. And so we thought about the idea of, well, maybe this information does exist. Maybe it's just out there in the podcast form. There's a lot of people that put up how to ask, but it turns out there really wasn't anybody. And the reaction was extremely positive and optimistic that it would be very beneficial if we did do that. And so we kind of took that and ran with it. And at the end of December and beginning of January, we launched our first episode. So why are we doing this? Well, education community and we're nerds. Brianna has even made a high turnout, wide margin swag. And I think one of them says I'm an election nerd, right? Something like that. Yeah. So it's, I think, I think we said in our first episode, it's for all these reasons, but it's also for kind of selfish reasons that, you know, we just want to talk to people we're interested in, we want to learn from them. I think as I might have mentioned, you know, in election administration, we really like to employ the case method, copy and steal everything. So the more we can learn from each other, the more we can copy and steal from each other and use because unlike private industry, in election administration, we're not competing with each other. We, you know, to the extent that other people succeed, you know, we succeed, it makes the whole community of election administrators better when more people are succeeding and doing new things and innovative things. So the podcast, I think, at least for me and for us has achieved that largely and we hope to continue doing it. And I think Brianna has some great audio clips as we move through this presentation just to kind of illustrate some of these points. So when we started this, were we expecting that all of this was going to be, you know, educational, community oriented? I mean, maybe we weren't really sure what we were getting into. It's been extremely fun and very educational, but not always exactly what we expected it to be. But what have we learned since we started doing it? What in that narrative is absolutely everything? I mean, I think it'd be very interesting just to go through all of the logistics and that this is what's involved.  We have to check the voter registration list and look at this voter registration list. And this is how it works. I think people love those stories. And I think, you know, quite frankly, because of all the misinformation and all the terrible, terrible, terrible attacks against election officials, you know, non-partisan election officials, I think it's important that you really have to come out and tell your story. This is who we are. You know, we are public servants. We are the people who are trying to make democracy work. So Pam Fessler, who just recently retired from NPR, was one of our more recent guests, but she really illustrated a point we've heard over and over again, especially when we're talking about trying to combat disinformation, trying to get good information out there, continuing to be trusted sources of information as the election office or our respective jurisdictions. And that's that, you know, it doesn't cut it to just say, here's where the voter registration deadline is. Here's how you request an absentee ballot.  It's something that we've taken very literally. And in some ways, it's been a very meta thing that we are telling these stories through this podcast and hopefully helping to further that narrative for other people that need to be able to share this information and do it in a way that's compelling enough that people don't just tune it out and say, you know, I know how to vote, I know when to register, but there's nothing that's really pulling them into why it's still important that we do what we do and why it's important that they can feel that their ballot is being counted, that everything is safe and secure and that elections are being run with integrity and with security. I think it's also important to point out that election administrators by and large are not media hounds. You know, I think a lot of election administrators are used to kind of toiling in anonymity. They appreciate whatever, you know, little recognition they might give from time to time, but usually they're on the news around election time, trying to get out that kind of basic information and then, you know, they go behind the scenes after that. But what 2020 showed everybody was that whether election administrators like it or not, they're going to be thrust into the spotlight. And to the point that Breanna just made, Pam Fessler was very strident in her belief that election administrators need to really try to tell their story and make it compelling. So that was a really great takeaway, I think, from that. We also, I mean, we knew this as election authorities, but it really it really became crystal clear as we were talking to more local election authorities, how much this whole process and this whole field runs on community. And as Eric was saying, this is an extremely collaborative field. It is not one where, you know, we're trying to forward information from each other. We're trying to be like the best one. Everybody is working on a common goal. We're all trying to serve our voters in the best way that we can. And so it really becomes this kind of family oriented group. And if you think about everything that we went through in 2020 and all of the different stresses that we had just as people, not just as election authorities, it's very hard to not be able to have that kind of camaraderie. And so we've learned just how important that is it to the profession itself, not just to ourselves, but to the profession itself. It's just fun to get around and chat.  Or formalities go away, you talk to whoever you want. It really is. I used to think that that was waste of time. Now I think that's more important than showing up to the meeting times. And that's Ricky Hatch from Weaver County, Utah. Ricky is and on the executive board of IGO, the International Association of Government Officials. He also is very active in NACO, National Association of Counties. And as you saw, he just made the point that collaborating and just kind of sharing stories is a big part of election administration. And I would, I would agree with him. And I think many election administrators would that just kind of having that camaraderie and being able to share stories is is valuable. And, you know, making what you do a little bit better just to learn what other people are doing. But it's also kind of cathartic in that just it's just like I think in many professions that you really you can't understand it unless you're in it. And so for election administrators, being able to talk to each other and and share those stories. And our podcast is I think just a little a little part of that. But also being together at conferences and things makes a big difference. So that's, I think we hope our podcast is kind of filling up a little bit of that void, especially while people couldn't really go to conferences. And but even even when things, you know, go back to some more in person things, we hope to keep it going because I think it still fills a need amongst election administrators. We've also learned, which is not as positive, but definitely something that I feel like we've all felt is that the field is simultaneously energized and demoralized. We've probably talked to an equal number of people that feel like, you know, wow, this is really our time to shine. We have this opportunity to teach people about how elections are being administered, to really tie into the fact that more people than ever paying attention to how elections are being run. And that's really wonderful. But at the same time, many of our colleagues are getting threats issued at them and are feeling pressured, not just from their own voters, but voters from other jurisdictions, people from all across the country, if they're being targeted in certain states and things like that. And it makes it incredibly hard, especially like how Eric said, a lot of us work in the background, where you never thought that this was going to be a job that thrust you into the spotlight and made you a target in a lot of ways. So there are people that have really looked at that and said, well, this is an opportunity. And then there's people that are leaving the field because it's that difficult right now. And it's just not worth it when you think about all of the tasks and responsibilities that our offices have. Not all of us are just election authorities. There's lots of other things that our offices have to do. And in a lot of places, elections are actually a very small part of the job. So if you think about people that are trying to do 50 things for their county, just to keep the lights on and payroll happening and elections taking up more and more of their time and their energy, it's just not it's just not sustainable. And details matter. I mean, the people out here who know me and hear that said, oh, well, that's Paul's mantra, you know, that's that's what I've always heard Paul talk about. And that's what I would say to anybody wanting to get in this job and get in the and once you're in it to understand the details, you know, and I know plenty of folks who've gotten into the job in a partisan manner who understand after they're in there, well, you know, I'm serving everybody. And I really have to tone down my partisanship. And I think that, you know, I think if they do that, they'll find, you know, that the job is very rewarding, that you're serving your voters. It's very difficult right now under these circumstances that people are attacking, you know, election officials for one thing or the other. You have to have thick skin. But I think if you keep your honesty, your integrity and professionalism, you'll do a great job. And more than ever, we really need good people in these jobs. And we have during the course of this podcast, we've talked to several election administrators that were thrust into the spotlight. Last year, you know, I think of people like Tina Barton from Michigan and Al Schmidt from Philadelphia. Joseph Kirk from Georgia. And what Paul just said, there was a common thread in what all those folks said to us that, you know, they came under intense scrutiny last year, but they were very proud of what they had done. They all felt that that they had conducted themselves in a professional and manner with integrity. And that, you know, they were certainly frustrated and maybe a little downtrodden from the way they were treated in some cases, but they were proud of their staffs. They were proud of their poll workers. And they were proud of all the work that they had put in. And that at the end of the day, you know, after the recounts and audits, which, which they had all done on their own volition, you know, proved out that at least in their cases that the 2020, the November 2020 election was, was very accurate and very honest. So I, again, I just think having those conversations with people that had been through some of the worst of it last year, you know, reinforced how important it is to, to stick around in this, in this profession and, and to find more good people to do it. And that, for some people, you certainly can blame them for, for looking to other career paths and a number of people are doing that. But I still think there are a lot of good folks around that are going to keep doing it for years to come. And I think these are the lessons that we're trying to impart. You know, this is not, we didn't start this podcast thinking we would have widespread appeal. I mean, this is a podcast that we designed for other election officials. And so with our takeaways, we're hoping that other election officials have very similar takeaways and are at least feeling like they're a that they're not alone, but be that there is still energy in the field. There are still things that we have that we're doing very well and that there's a lot of people in our corner. And having that sense of pride is something that is not unique to any particular local election authority. I think everybody has that. It's one of the things that draws people in. One of the big things that we learned when we're going through all of these is we always ask people how they ended up in elections in the first place. So the first question we always ask is, you know, did you did you come into this intentionally? Did you fall into it? And, you know, 99% of the people never plan to be local election authorities. There was something that happened that either landed them there, like a part-time position that they decided they just fell in love with, or they were working in another field. And then this position happened to open up. And so they ended up working there and realized how much they loved it. But everybody that we've talked to, it really draws you in. And like Eric said, it makes you want to stick around. And it helps when you know that other people are all working towards that same goal too. So what do we do? I mean, we're here presenting at DEF CON not to just talk about how funded it is to be an election official, but also to talk about, you know, we've had this terrible dismiss information campaign that has been going on all throughout 2020 that's continuing on through 2021. And we're looking at going into 2022 and what are we going to do? And hopefully in one way, putting all this information out there and demystifying some of local election administration and just talking to the people and humanizing them is one way to combat that. But the other thing we can do is collaborate. You know, it's something that we naturally do anyway. But what we've seen over this past year has also been huge collaboration between industry, academics, people that had not necessarily all been in the same room and asking the same questions and trying to reach the same goals are now having all of these synthesizing meetings and discussions and conferences to try to get everybody on the same page because we're all fighting now the same enemy, which is disinformation. It's also really important. One of the things that we talked about with a lot of our guests is filling the space with that narrative. I mean, narrative is one of the ways that you can do that. But at this particular time, I mean, it's 2021, there's not a ton of elections that are happening. There are a lot of places that have local elections and things like that, but it's not a November 2020 general election. It's not something that's on the top of everybody's mind that they have to go vote, they have to pick who they want to represent them. This is the time where we as local election authorities can do that collaboration, work on planning out for 2022 and start trying to be proactive and not just reactive. I mean, that's something that came through a lot too is as we're preparing for future elections, we can do as much preparation as we want. I mean, that's in our DNA is to make sure that we are 100% planned with all sorts of redundancies in case something happens in the election. But we're not always great at predicting exactly what that common enemy is going to be at any given election. So you can follow that trajectory, you know, 2016 out of that came cybersecurity efforts. We started working on cybersecurity efforts. We thought that's what it was going to be in 2018 2020. And we were all prepared for that. We've done fantastic work and federal governments and fantastic work and DEF CON has done fantastic work in furthering that cybersecurity. But then here comes this whole disinformation campaign that really ended up filling the entire space. And we need to take some of that back. We need to start reclaiming that for the trustworthy and accurate and honest information so that that's what voters hear. I hope if nothing else, you know, what comes out of everything has transpired since last November's election, that at least people who have good intentions, once they learn that elections aren't being run by the Venezuelan government, they will actually start to learn about some of the nuts and bolts of election administration. And as Pam Fessler mentioned, if we can tell our story or if people, other people can help to tell our story, that, you know, at least some people in the media, in academia and things like that start to understand some of the challenges and other things that we have. You know, I think one, another thing Pam Fessler mentioned that was very interesting that when she, you know, back in the early 2000s, when she would kind of cover the voting beat, the election administration beat, she might be the only reporter there at a national association on secretaries of state meeting or something like that. And now there are, you know, dozens sometimes.  So if there's a silver lining to this, I hope maybe that's what it is, that especially some folks in the media are really starting to learn how elections are run, because it's an ever-evolving field, like Brianna was just saying that, you know, we had, as election administrators, really had a bone up on cybersecurity and start to take that more seriously after the 2016 elections. And now, mis and dis and mal information are things that are in the vocabulary of all election administrators. And that's something I think we're going to get better at as the time goes on. And finally, I think listening is still incredibly important. I mean, we can talk all day about how local election authorities talk to each other and we collaborate, but it's also important to listen to our voters. It's important to listen to our own stakeholders, because at the end of the day, we are a public service-oriented administration. So, you know, we make sure that everything is ready for election day. We make sure that everything is prepared for being able to cast ballots and all of that. But we have to listen to our voters about what they have concerns about, what they have questions about, and not be defensive when somebody does try to get us to explain more of the process. Part of, I think, being a very administrative field is that we're not used to being asked a lot of questions about how things work, and it can be taken in a defensive way. And so listening and trying to, you know, really take to heart that voters deserve to have that information, and we can put that information out there, and it's actually beneficial to everybody. It's beneficial to us, too. It helps combat some of that bad information out there. It's something that's really important that, hopefully, as more local election authorities are thinking about what they can do moving into 2022, wanting feedback and listening to that feedback is one of those things. I hope that's another good thing that comes out of the post-election mess that 2020 was, that election administrators become a little more open to how things are presented to the public and how the public can come and see what they do. As Brianna just mentioned, you know, election administrators, by and large, they weren't used to a lot of people coming to their office and wanting to see this and understand, you know, how do you process the ballots? What happens here? I mean, it used to be years ago we would shout from the rooftops. This is, you know, what we do. This is how things work. Nobody cared. Nobody was interesting coming to the election office and watching ballots be processed or audits take place. They were still taking place. It was all being done but, you know, very few people cared. So, now that it's come to the forefront that, you know, party challengers, the media, whoever, they may want to be a part of this process. Hopefully, election administrators find a way to make them part of the process and how they show how their jobs are done and then it leads to, again, more understanding. Last, we just wanted to thank everyone for listening and for allowing us to speak at DefCon. If you are interested in listening to the podcast, it's on any podcast distributor. So, whichever your favorite one is, it will be on there and we're also on Twitter. But you can also always reach out to us and ask any questions. One of the things that also has come to light is how much local election officials really don't mind talking to people that want to know more about it. I mean, it has not been hard for us to find guests necessarily because everybody wants to talk about what they do. And we are very appreciative to everybody that has been a guest on the show and really appreciate their sharing their experience and their information.


Hi everyone, welcome to our Protocol Labs research seminar. Today we are joined by Miguel Pinchera who is currently a postdoc researcher at the Open IoT Research Unit of the Brunner Kessler Foundation. Miguel received his PhD from the University of Trento in Italy, has previously worked as a lecturer and robotics group tutor at the University of Biobio in Chile and is currently interested in researching the integrations of the Internet of Things with other technologies. Today Miguel will be talking about blockchain-based IoT system architectures and their practical implementation in agriculture. So Miguel, I will let you take it from here. Thank you, Amy. So yeah, as Amy kind of introduced me, my name is Miguel Pinchera and here I'm here today to talk about our research. I work at the Open IoT Unit Research Unit and particularly I want to talk about blockchain-based IoT system. So we are a base IoT unit and we are exploring blockchain as a research topic and today in particular I want to talk about practical implementation of this, this combination of IoT and blockchain for agricultural use cases. So the session today I split it in four parts. First I will start with an introduction of Internet of Things, a brief state of the art, what is leading us to our research, then our approach to using blockchain IoT systems and a proposed architecture for this integration of blockchain into IoT systems. Then I will present a few highlights that I found interesting from use cases, real use cases, where we have uses architecture that integrates blockchain and IoT into agricultural domain, in particular a water management system and another use case that is agriculture traceability and then we wrap it up with completion and let's say future work that we are in vision. So first of all to put us in context I want to define what is the Internet of Things and for that I like to use this analogy that current statistics show that over four billion of people are currently connected to the Internet. So considering that we are more or less eight billions of inhabitants for the planet this means that half of the population is connected to the Internet. In parallel to that this is that also show that there are more than 23 billion of devices also connected to the Internet. That means three times the population of the more less three times the population of the entire world of devices that are connected to the Internet. So the term Internet of Things referred of these devices that are connected to the Internet but with a particular task that is collecting data and creating or or creating recollecting data to create application that will help people in daily activities. So all the network the system the software that connect this device for this data interchange is what we can define the Internet of Things in a more general way. Typically the Internet of Things systems so how these devices are grouped are ordered into systems that are relatively complex because there are several pieces that need to interact and to make this system more easily they are divided into layers which typically talk about layer architecture of this software system software and hardware systems. All the devices have different capabilities and for that have also different constraints in terms of computing power and requirements and this layer architecture is typically used to to organize the systems. At the base layer there's called the device layer or the sensing layer where the most smaller devices typically the sensor are located. These devices tend to favor size smaller size and power consumption less power consumption over processing capabilities or communication capabilities. So to overcome this limitation that the small size devices have we have another layer that is typically called the edge layer where more powerful device provide the missing capabilities to the sensors. This could be a more network connectivity, more computing power, more storage capabilities. And on the top of this layer of the devices and the edge we found the cloud layer where we store and process all the information that is collected by the smaller devices. Typically on this cloud layer there are the the applications reside so are the more the end layer of the system. In this context the current IoT system favor a closed cloud-based centralized architecture meaning that the top layer the cloud layer is typically on the cloud and where a trusted intermediary the service provided provide different services for both the users of this application and the devices. For instance that the management authentication that kind of service are provided at this layer. This centralized architecture are easy or help to develop more easily this system and organize it more easily. But they introduce an intermediary that can introduce several potential issues to the ecosystem related to security related to a centralized point of failure for an entire architecture and many of the typical that if you're working with web free and blockchain you know which one we want to move away from centralized systems. So in this case the IoT is a really good candidate of a centralized infrastructure where we can rely on this centralized application. That is why in the latest in the recent year there has been increasing interest in blocking technology for enabling decentralized IoT architectures. These architectures tend to replace this cloud layer or even a smaller layer for this decentralized blockchain based application or systems. And however despite this growing interesting because it's really been growing from the last five four or five years there's still some research gap as we can say there are still points that need to be addressed. Particularly if we are looking from a practical point of view my unit has really applied a practical approach to this topic so we are really focusing on the practical issues that are still missing from the research. And one of the main issues the first issue is that the current literature the current research that you can find favor a smaller device with or consider that the sensors are devices more powerful than they are really are. So what we are using is sensors that are more related to edge devices that are proper sensors something really small with really low power requirements which could be useful for some use case but in the agriculture environment on the agriculture domain when we use favor size and energy consumption it's a really no no to go. On the other hand when you actually or the research consider small sensors this typically needs to rely on another component there is an intermediary in this case is inside the system itself but still an intermediary which can also create a security issue. For instance if you rely on the gateway and you get compromised the gateway you get compromised a lot of sensors too. And finally one other research cap or one point that we find we could exploit a little bit more is the fact that the smart contracts are really underused if you look at from a software perspective point of view. So the key element of our research is to rely on blockchain to enable decentralized IoT architectures where we use constraints devices so real sensor really small sensors. So the key elements are that the constraint devices are direct actors on the blockchain system they are not intermediaries the sensor itself should be part of the blockchain system. So they have a unique identity in this case for us the identity is just the capabilities to manage the private or public keys for the cryptographic functionalities that you need to do to be able to interact with a blockchain. And also the fact that the device is managing its own key give it give it let's say a root of crash for the sensor data and the sensor data is the key of the entire IoT system. Another key element that we actually focus also in our research is to use permissionless blockchains or public blockchains in order to integrate the application itself the agricultural application to many actors that you may not know so really entrusted actors. And the last point of the last point of our approach is to actually rely on a smart contract as software platform. So when we are developing this blockchain based application for agriculture many of the business logic we try to if not the entire business logic we try to implement it on the blockchain itself so using smart contract. This translates in our proposed architecture that we are going to talk a little bit more here each device is a direct actor of the blockchain system with a unique identity as well as any user of the blockchain has its unique identity in the sense of public public and private keys that is managed by the cell the device itself is managing a pair of private keys that give him a unique identity. For us at this stage of the research managing the keys is enough to prove their entity even though we know that blockchain could be enabled to to elaborate or to provide more complex identity scheme decentralized identity scheme so for us for now I'm managing the key and the device is good enough to start. Also our approach to rely on the smart contract as software components we use the approach similar to the digital twin this contract of information that is has a lot of fast words that is related to it we use a similar concept in the sense that each device is represented by the blockchain by a smart contract that is a twin of this device on the blockchain. Where this smart twin is not maintained or the information not feed by the user but directly by the sensor and finally we have another component that is a smart twin app so another type of contract that relies on this smart twin on the blockchain to to create the blockchain application itself for the iot system that we want to develop. So this architecture we conceptualize a software framework so we divide in software components divided in three layers that try to match typically three layers that we saw before for current iot systems. First of all the framework is blockchain diagnostic so we are not thinking about any particular blockchain just in it the smart contract capability and that's all and then we divide in these two three models the first model the key model let's say of the architectures is device model that provide the blockchain identity or the blockchain connectivity for the iot device. In our architecture the gateway what is on the edge acts as a transparent gateway so nothing nothing here is done everything's going through the device through to the next layer that is the blockchain layer where all the smart contract providing the application logic. So a really straightforward application where the gateway that can be used for other communications let's say tasks in this case it's not related to the data that is gathered by the sensor it's just a transparent gateway providing a communication related. So one of the key of this software framework that we propose is the device model that we want to see because that is what we convert a normal iot sensor a really constrained device in terms of computing power memory and this space into a blockchain actor direct blockchain actor which is actually a term that now you can find in also a trustworthy oracle an oracle for the blockchain system this device that has a unique event is one step closer to be more or to be trustworthy than any other device that doesn't have the blockchain identity. So this device is the key of the architecture and when we try to evaluate and explode and see if it was actually something to actually work with and the device is divided in three main tasks the device itself performed six steps that are related to all the blockchain operations sensing and coding hashing but also all the communication are related to the system itself. So to make it more easy we divide this task of the device model into three main categories sensing that is also just what the sensor normally does the blockchain part that we try to to insert in these devices and then the communication which is actually the typically communication for any iot devices so at the end the device model what we try to prove what we want to evaluate and we research on is to how we add this blockchain part inside the sensor with this proposed framework and this software framework conceptualization we try to evaluate it in different use cases and today I'm going to talk about two that are related to agriculture domain the first one is related to water management in fact there's a reference for the for the entire research paper if you're interested and it's it's talk about cost effective iot devices in a blockchain based water management system so the motivation for the use case comes from the fact that more than 85 percent of fresh water is currently used for agricultural practice so we know there's a water scarcity now and it has been for the last year so knowing that 85 percent is used for agricultural practices means that we need to do something there in that context there's we are working a research project that is called SAPI and that is a collaborative research project between a water management company a winery what a wine producer and a farming cooperative here in Italy the goal is to foster sustainable behaviors by reducing water consumption while preserving the quality and quantity of the crops yield so still producing the same quality of quantity but with less water consumption and the idea behind this project is to use low cost battery power iot devices as we talked before that water measure the water usage on the fields but also that report that to a blockchain system and a blockchain infrastructure and here in the blockchain infrastructure we use smart contracts to provide a trusted platform where it can include more additional actors that maybe we don't know about yet that can provide incentives to to foster these water savings so we took our architecture and we elaborated into this use case i'm going to briefly explain here so we have the constrained devices we have the twin contract that will represent the device on the blockchain and we have the contract that will provide the functionalities of the use case in this case everything related to to water management so first let's say a customer or a farmer has a water sensor that is measuring the water consumption on his farm he's on her farm and this device is directly represented in the blockchain by a bulk contract a twin contract of this bulk that is storing the information about the water consumption and it's directly maintained by the sensor the farmer doesn't have access or the control to to tamper the information the sensor reports information this can be replicated to to to many other many other farmers and then what we do is we create another contract for instance to reward this water saving and the contract itself is managed by any actor that wants to foster this water saving so we have the information about the water savings or water consumption and then we can open this information in a blockchain in a public blockchain so open to anybody that can create a contract to foster these savings whatever it means like for instance by token by money itself or whatever you want to use there and the idea is that this contract is twin up contract indirectly with the bulk however the the more interesting part of the the architecture itself of the use case itself is that we can replicate this to many other farmers for instance many other farmers give the information and their work can be extended to many other this part but also include the functionalities of the water management system for instance the billing where a service provider can use the same information that we store on the bulk to do the the payment of the water consumption and also some kind of foundation that can give certification saying that your product the farmer product produce let's is produced with less less water than the I don't know another single product and all of these get automatically interact inside the blockchain and take advantage of this audible and transparent record of information so that is our use case and that we wanted to implement so we took our software framework the one I presented before and on this let's say first version we tailored it to the Ethereum blockchain the software the framework itself is blockchain agnostic but we choose Ethereum for being one of the most let's say common platform in current literature and also at the time that we were doing this research and we tailored our software framework to that the device model that we talked that is the key element of the architecture we implemented as a cross-platform software library using C and agrinoide agrin is a platform for typically do it yourself sensor so it's really open and can be used in many many different type of devices and considering that we also select six different platforms that are really low-cost sensors that we see on this table furthermore we use a water flow sensor that we implemented and we connected to the sensor and we use a shield for the communication here I want to make a highlight the shield says that it's using lora one network lora one network is a type of protocol communication that we typically use on every cultural or also smart city that allows you to to have great coverage with very low energy consumption and a large amount of coverage for digital signal for communication but with a limitation of slow speed and slow payload so you cannot send too much data not too often so there's a limitation that typically is well done or suitable for normal IoT application but could be a problem if we're using blockchain when we are adding more information that we want to share in any case going back to the devices we have this table of devices when we use different type of devices arduino uno which is a really common and typically board that you can buy in any store that is really easy to start to do in your own sensors or even more complex electronic products but we also move it to more complex architecture that is still very low cost and even more we use a type of farm hardware family that is the the MIPS architecture that is a type of device or a type of architecture that you can still find on some kind of devices the idea of choosing everything all this kind of variation is also to reflect that as i told before iot system is typically composed of several type of devices that can be of any type of plan so with this experiment what we try to do is try to ship as many as use case possible and one of the key elements here is that we focus on really constrained devices you can see we have clock or processing power of the devices ranging from 16 hertz megahertz sorry to 18 hertz and memory ranging ranging from 32 kilobyte to only 50 and 512 kilobyte all of them with a price lower than 25 euros at the price of the of the evaluation and well using this using architect tool we want to see how this behave are these devices capable of being a blockchain actor so send the information directly the blockchain is what we evaluate in this water management case and what we measure first was the footprint so how much do we have to consume on this device to include this blockchain functionality in the sensor itself and our statistics our studies show that actually even in the most constrained device you are able to run the blockchain part however as we can see there in the flashing part including the communication is too much for a really constrained device as an Arduino that only has 32 kilobyte of memory however in the same implementation we can see on the other boards for instance the m4l there is a lot of space to include more functionalities as well as the communication as we did so it's possible to include blockchain but depending on the communication that we want to use we may need to use another board that is a little bit more but still really really constrained devices in the same spirit of benchmarking this this this blockchain addition we also measure the time consumption because as we are going to see later the the processing times will help us to measure the energy consumption and here we can see that actually creating the digital signature which is one of the main tasks in the blockchain part so to create a blockchain transaction at least for the Ethereum use case the time range that this is the more time consuming task and in the Arduino the most constrained board is for four seconds to generate the transaction however a similar constrained board but only with 32 kil 32 bits processing power it's already less than one second and we can see in the rest of the board really short times moreover if we compare to them to the rest of the operation we can see the transmission so the communication part still the highest time needed for all the other use cases also we evaluate the compression we had to add for doing the use case using this lora 1 technology that has limited payload for transmission we have to reduce the transaction into a simple compression that on the one hand is able to fit on these constrained devices but on the hand provides enough compression to make the transaction fit into this payload that we have available for the lora 1 network and actually a simple dictionary compression that is really easy to implement on the device can provide almost 45 percent of compression of the transaction then one of the critical points for any other decision if the energy consumption so we measure with a tool that is called the OT device that provides a really precise power consumption measurement at five volts which was the typical use case and we consider a needle time so arrest time of the board as eight and eight seconds as reference without any low power consumption method so the board without any low power mode just the board in sleep mode and then working what we wanted to do and as the table shows the results in in joules while the the graph provided the current consumption in milliampers and we can see here that actually you can barely see any difference for any of the stage of the process so no difference between sensing or creating the blockchain transaction however the communication is the highest peak of energy for our device and taking this power consumption measurement we estimate the energy budget of the of the device meaning that how much is going to to use during the normal operation this means how much energy is used in evil mode so just waiting for anything to happen plus the sensing time and the transmitting time plus the blockchain that is what we are adding to this evaluation for this we consider a reference irrigation schedule since it's a water management system that varies from farmer to farmer but in average we can consider aggregation schedule of two hours twice a day and we evaluate two different monitoring cases continuous monitoring when we are measuring measuring every 15 minutes during this time this wind of two hours of irrigation or a reactive monitoring where we are measuring when you open the vault and when you close the vault so just a lapse of time and lots of elapsed water consumption during that two key points and with this energy bias of this scenario scenario of two hours twice a day the results show that both monitoring cases so continuous and reactive the blockchain part is barely noticeable as we can see the most time consuming is ill so just waiting for something to happen although we didn't implement low power in those mode but still just after the ill the sensing is the more consuming so adding the blockchain part as we can see is really marginal to what we are consuming which is a really good point to see that we can implement all of this on the blockchain sensor so this is an ongoing project that is given a really interesting result we still need to to to get the more concrete results about the the savings and everything but so far it's providing really interesting information about this use case so we assess this architecture in insane device in the virtual behavior we are focused on evaluating the impact of blockchain on the devices and our results show that actually really limited the sources so less than 35 euros with really limited memory space and power consumption can work as direct source data sources for blocking system with minimal energy overhead what is also really interesting at this constraint sensor scan directly feed a smart contract that created this new type of publication in fact using the public blockchain provides allow us to develop this kind of application where anybody can join to foster this virtual behavior of what we're saving and so that is really interesting for what we have learned from using a public blockchain whereas there's still some constraint regarding the time processing and for instance cost that we can talk in another time which leads us to our next use case more or less the same principle we want to test this architecture that we propose but in this case we want to really benchmark it and make a comparison between two different blockchain implementations and in this case we take we take a paper that we we work our first approach to blockchain iot system which was for crossability application so the motivation in this use case is a little bit different that in every culture this has been a really interesting blockchain for crossability for the transparency that blockchain can provide this is also lived by consumers and authorities are demanding more information about the food products that they consume so what they want is a transparent history of the entire process of the product from the farm so wherever it was produced to the final consumer and actually the table where you are consuming the fourth part of the of the use case to study this we have a first we did a first research paper in 2018 when we simplified every food process into six steps and we also highlighted where the sensors can produce information in this process across the entire six steps simplification sorry and also that the smart contract can create new information during this process but in that first version we only evaluate at the gateway labor so our first approach that was the main approach on the risk on the current literature at that time so no sensor involved the sensor was acting as usual and the blockchain part was added at a gateway labor so when we have a little bit of more computing power and at that time we compare Ethereum and sold to us to other alternatives but then we made a release version last year when we took the same use case but we went with more details and a more detailed also proof of concept implementation we use our architecture the same we use for the water management and we apply it to this crossability scenario here we also lower the price of the boards we said okay this is more even more demanding for what we want to do there are more steps so we lower the cost and we set a baseline of 20 euros less than 20 euro for the board we wanted to carry and once again we focus on the device so how we do this the use case let's we take all of the step of the six steps of the crossability process which is time on the farm and finish on the consumer getting the food on the store and we implemented on the blockchain to make it more simple here we only focus on the transportation so for instance when the farmer is sending the raw materials the food raw material to the processor where it's going to be processed and here we consider that the the transportation has let's say as a couple of sensors inside the the transportation station for instance it has a GPS there's monitoring waypoints of the directory from the farmer to the processor but it also has an environmental sensor that the measuring for instance temperature and humidity of the container where the food is transported and for that the the processor the one that is receiving has that can create a delivery contract that is going to be for instance paying automatically on receivable and this receivable is going to be estimated or or calculated in the based on the waypoints that the GPS is reporting but also considering that for instance no anomaly on the temperature was registered by the temperature sensor so for instance the delivery can set automatically set that if the temperature passes some threshold let's say 30 degrees while transporting the payment is not going to be made automatically following the same reasoning we open the architecture for other actors to create other type of contract that automatically interact with the sensors on the transport for instance to transfer the ownership to different farmer or different actors in the system or to get a certification for the retailer that the food is well perceived during the entire process for instance so once again we focus on evaluating this but this time we extended the library from Ethereum to Sotut so another blockchain platform that is mostly used for private implementation but the idea is to to compare see if the our results that work for Ethereum can work also in other implementations um we include for instance another board that is this p32 that's appear in the recent year that is really common to see for doing yourself right that you have really low cost but the thing is that this board provides a lot of more research on the same cost on the same power consumption still boards that are less than 20 euros of price actually the more expensive still the you know which is 18 euros but you can find replacement that are not official let's say Arduino made but similar architecture were way less than 10 euros for for the board and here we did another evaluation also the footprints of this including these blockchain operations on sensor but comparing the two blockchain implementation so Ethereum one hand and Soto on the other one regarding disk space so how much program we need to put inside we can see that the avid board can fit a zero implementation but Soto is more demanding it cannot fit in a normal board with only just 32 kilobyte of memory similarly the the 32 bits require more space and and also it's not feasible however as we can see for the sixth board only two were not able to fit the the proposed architecture in terms of disk space regarding memory this more or less the same happened we we started noticing that the Soto implementation or at least our porting of the library to to be able to interact with Soto also has higher memory requirements however really constrained device in this case only for Soto only five or six boards were able to handle the entire implementation however for Ethereum as we saw before we have no problems for even a really low constrained device one comment here we didn't focus on any communication technology as we did before for the water management when we use Lora one here we open it to many other energy available communication technologies so we just opt for a serial communication and simulations and just to get a base reference and then we can eventually try for instance Wi-Fi Bluetooth or whatever we have available but we're still focusing more on the blockchain part and as we can see here we have a lot of space to continue working what is interesting here is that the processing time for Soto was almost twice the time for the Ethereum time and this is related to the protocol if you've ever seen how that blockchain section is made for Soto what the main difference is that requires two digital signatures and obviously that doubles the time as we saw in the first use case is the main time consuming task for creating blockchain inside the device blockchain transaction server and also that reflects on the transaction size for Ethereum the average size was 132 34 bytes where for Soto this almost 925 bytes so a larger transaction and this high demanding resources also translates into energy which is finding the main key for IoT here we have an average graph of the energy consumption for Ethereum on top and Soto to estimate we use the same machine we use the same energy budget so it'll just do anything sensing and creating the blockchain information and transmitting once again we didn't implement no low power mode so there is no low power when it's in little mode and that shows that the device is currently the highest energy consumption in the entire process what was interesting here is that despite that Ethereum sorry Soto requires more energy for creating a bigger transaction and also for transmitting a bigger transaction when we put in the context of a daily energy usage for IoT sensor it's still very very low it's less actually it's less than 1% of additional energy so which also encourages us to say okay we can soon use this constrained device to be part of a blockchain based system for at least for our use case that we were evaluating which will open the door to use this smart contract that are really relying on this sensor as trustworthy oracles that also enables to develop this blockchain based application using the smart contracts or relaying also entirely on the blockchain network summarizing we assess the blockchain based traceability application in this case with an event based traceability case study here I want to make an observation typically when you work with IoT you talk about collecting a lot of data so to to don't over over saturate on over consume information on the blockchain we just create some event based monitoring for instance when we do in water management we talk about measuring irrigation and a certain time interval that was quite long let's say 50 minutes or event when you open or close the water valve and here the same we were measuring certain events for instance when we're doing the transportation certain gps white points only registered not the entire path and also when we have some anomalies on the temperature on the humidity not the entire information on the blockchain itself this can still be sent to the typically normal IoT system and one second our show show that this constrained device can work also in this scenario comparing even two different blockchain implementations underlying it a theorem and so to what we show is clear that small variation in the protocol as it told before the sort of protocols used to do two different signatures two different state of signatures for the data which create a lot of more resource in the demand on the sensory itself despite this the constraint sensors can still be used with both implementation with minimal impact on the resources whereas the present time the memory and the most important the energy value that is one of the key elements for IoT devices particularly in agricultural environments let's wrap it up what we have what I have presented today so our research focus on integrating blockchain technology into the Internet of Things to develop new type of decentralized IoT applications and for that we propose an architecture that concerns constraints sensor devices really small IoT devices that open a lot of use case particularly in agriculture and the other key element of our architecture is to use a smart contract to implement the application logic the application platform and we have valued this architecture in two different use case one for water management and one for possibility and in both cases the constraints sensors constrained in the terms of memory space this space costs and energy requirements can work with a really common platform as a theorem and also on private implementation as sorted and what is really also really important to highlight the smart contract we're able to provide the software platform to develop the logic of every use case in this use case that we show as future work on this recent what we continue or want to do is to to port this library since we started in Ethereum we want to sort it we also would like to try different implementations for instance hybrid fabric that has been really used in current literature for blockchain experiment and for that also see made in more accurate energy consumption and using other communication technologies we evaluate the most constrained that was Laura one but we could also start using 3G 4G or even the new 5G generation and also one is and I'm going to research is related to the smart contract for more security analysis so we can say how much secure how this blockchain based application and also infrastructure cost that actually is ongoing really active and to estimate how much is going to cost for instance when we are using public or what we have to pay if we want to create our own private infrastructure and also another interesting topic is to try to implement or migrate or adapt this architecture to later to architecture so this is secure channel of between when we are using public that is what is we are envisioning in our research so that's all thank you so much for this invitation for any time to talk about what we do here in the open IT unit could be here now or later there is my content information so please free to contact at any time thank you so much Miguel for taking the time to talk with us I really appreciate it


My dad was a farmer not because he loved it because he tried to keep the operation alive And and there were some decent years in farming when when he could do that, you know But he he'd give it up a long time ago and wanted to make it a grass operation a cow-calf operation You know if we could Winner on grass as opposed to rolling up hay and roll feeding it out every year That's what he was aiming for One thing about this ranch, you know, it's in the Cheyenne River break, so it's marginal land at best This is cow country and always always will be This year we're facing a pretty severe drought and been forced to make some decisions One thing we've had to do is destock a little bit and the way we've been doing that is Least an extra 50 head of cow pasture up in Elm Springs in addition to what we graze here And so we took 50 cows out and we'll sell those early Really, we haven't even gotten into our summer pastures. We're just now getting into them We've been grazing through all of our hay meadows our alfalfa and all of our annual planted crops just to extend the grazing season The crops both alfalfa and the annuals didn't do well enough to put up hay on so we decided to graze them and Give our grass that much more rest and that much more time to maybe catch a rain What that done is allowed that native grass to mature and get its maximum potential growth under these conditions and Prayed a lot for rain. We started using some cover crops and trying to keep a live Plant in the ground as much as we can and then on the grass. We're just trying to manage cattle By rotating and not being in one spot for too long Under drought conditions, it's it's such a Fast-changing thing and if you don't make the adjustment, it's easy to damage your operation These decisions are hard decisions to make But our goal is to save it for the future save the grass that the cattle can be replaced if we can keep a little seed and Save our grass it'll it'll come back. We'll be there again. I personally feel quite blessed that have The opportunity to grow up and live in this environment and raise my family my grandsons All the generations before me have got it to this point I just like to maybe pass it on to my kids in a better condition than it is, you know


I'm so excited to share with you perhaps one of the best kept secrets to our health. A superpower that we are all born with and that we can use to be fearless in response to stress, stay healthy, and to fix the world's toughest challenges. And in order to do that, I'm going to start by asking you, all of you, to think of something in your life that is causing you stress right now. Now, as you do that, keep in mind that what happens in the body is that you mount what's called the fight-or-flight stress response. I think most of you might be familiar with that. Your heart races up, your breathing gets quicker, you might start to sweat, and your muscles start to tighten, and they get ready basically to fight or to run. Now, this is a great response to have if you have a car coming at you or if you have a tiger coming at you in the wild, because this is a survival response, and it helps you to stay safe. However, our brain can't tell the difference between a tiger and an angry email or a conflict you might be having at work or something in your business. So what we all end up doing is that we keep mounting this fight-or-flight stress response throughout our days. And what's most important to realize is that when we are in this mindset, our vision becomes really tunneled. We literally narrow our perspective, and we become really self-focused. We forget about the people around us, and we don't have access to our best creativity and ideas. And worst of all, we make really bad decisions. We reach for the food or the drink or the social media as a coping mechanism, or, worst still, we make really bad decisions for our business. In fact, Thomas Merton said this really well. He said that in order to survive, we instinctively destroy that on which our survival depends. Now let's take a look at the evidence at what this kind of mindset has done for us. Three out of four of us in this conference are going to suffer from a lifestyle-related chronic disease. That's things like heart disease and cancer and diabetes and mood disorders. Even though 80 to 90% of these diseases are completely preventable, when we pay attention to the choices that we make about what we eat, how we move, and how we manage our stress. Our mental health has never been worse. The burnout rates across professions, including entrepreneurs, are 50% or higher. Suicide rates in the US are at a 30-year high. Anxiety and depression are continuously increasing. And one in four people in the US report that they don't have a single person to talk to when something important happens in their life. In fact, social isolation and loneliness is predicted to be the next big health epidemic. More and more of us are reporting the sense of emptiness, this loneliness, this lack of purpose, and a lack of true connection with others, even though we have all of the technology and material wealth around us. And technology, well, it's only making us more and more distracted.  And when it comes to AI, I'm sure all of you know that there's so much uncertainty. And so the question is, will we have the moral and the courage to develop technology that is beneficial to most people and that doesn't just benefit a few? And all of these questions around personal health are useless if we end up destroying our planet. And so how are we, as entrepreneurs and investors and founders, going to respond to this notice that was given by climate scientists just a few weeks ago about the state of the world? My favorite biologist, E.O. Wilson, has put this very poetically. He says that we are drowning in information but starving for wisdom. So what's a fearless entrepreneur to do? Well, I have some good news for you. The good news is that fight or flight is not the only response that we have available to stress. Our brains and our bodies are wired to respond in a different way. And that response is compassion. Compassion is our ability to notice stress and suffering when they're happening in ourselves and in the people around us, along with a desire and a motivation to do something to alleviate that suffering. In other words, the next time you're feeling stressed, forget about yourself, go out and help somebody else. Now, I'm sure all of you are thinking, wait a minute, if I'm stressed and if I go out and help somebody else, how is that going to reduce my stress? And how does that make me fearless? Well, let me explain. There are very good biological and evolutionary reasons for this. So get this, when we go out and help somebody else, something fantastic happens in our body. It activates our parasympathetic nervous system. This is the complete opposite of the fight or flight. So what this means is that when we help others, our heart rate goes down, our muscles relax, our blood pressure goes down, and our stress levels start coming down immediately. The other fantastic thing that happens is that we engage the biology of courage and hope. And what this means is that we bring online three amazing hormones. The first is oxytocin. Now oxytocin is a hormone that immediately reduces our stress levels, but it also increases the levels of love and caring and connection between people and relationships. The second hormone that comes online when we help others is dopamine. And dopamine is our feel-good hormone. This is a hormone that lights up our reward centers in the brain, and it immediately reduces our fear, making us fearless and making us motivated to go out and take action. And the third hormone that comes online is serotonin. And serotonin makes us really smart. It gives us access to all of our great creativity and ideas so we can come up with the best solutions to the problem. So why did this happen? Why did our brains engineer this response to stress? Well, think about it. Back in the day when we were hunters and gatherers, we didn't have just a fight-or-flight response for survival. In order to survive, we had to stick together in tribes and look after ourselves. That was the only way that we could stay alive. And that's why we developed this response for compassion.  If you only had fight-or-flight, what would happen?  Similarly, back in those days, if you were just a lone ranger, you would not live very long. You had to stick together in tribes and villages. You had to take care of each other in order to survive. In both these instances, the brain had to engineer a new system to respond to danger and stress, a response that would override the fight-or-flight response and a response that would make us want to connect with one another and help one another. So now that we know that we have this other response to stress available that's compassion, the question becomes, how do we get better at it? Because we're all born with this capacity, we're all born with compassion networks in the brain. And the answer is very simple, through meditation and mindfulness training. Just like you train your physical body through different kinds of physical exercises, you can train your compassion and mindfulness through meditation training. And this is exactly what we do at Wisdom Labs where we design training programs and technologies to help your brain networks get stronger. But don't take my word for it, let's quickly take a look at the evidence for whether or not this kind of training actually benefits you. So those people who practice mindfulness and compassion training, five, 10, 15 minutes a day consistently, live longer and healthier than people who don't. And this is because their stress levels are lower, their inflammation is lower, their resilience is higher, their immunity is better. Another cool thing happens when we do these practices, and that is that we are able to disrupt our habit loops in the brain. So what this means is that when we are triggered by stress, instead of reaching for our usual knee-jerk response, you know, whatever that food or that drink or social media or whatever choice you were going to make, we are actually able to interrupt that habit loop. We're able to pause, take a breath, be mindful, and then choose a wise response. A wise response, not just in our lifestyles, but a wise response for our businesses as well. In fact, what you're seeing right now are the changes that take place in the brain, different areas that get strengthened when we do these practices on a regular basis. And basically what it's saying is that when we practice mindfulness and compassion regularly, we get really good at paying attention. We become the person in the room who is focused, even if there's a lot of chaos and distraction around us. We are the person in the room who can manage our emotions powerfully. And we are the person in the room who has the ability to empathize and take the perspective of others in making decisions, to be generous and kind and compassionate. In other words, in summary, when we train these brain networks, what happens is that we develop an ethical and emotional clarity, which helps us to make better decisions. Better decisions for ourselves, better decisions for our business, and better decisions for the planet. I love this poem. It underscores the fact that no matter where we look in the world, there is a lot of pain and suffering. And so as entrepreneurs and investors and founders, we bear a huge burden of responsibility and we have a choice to make. I'll be going to go with our old mindset and fight our flight and have our personal health and our planet become just another statistic. Or I'll be going to choose differently. I'll be going to upgrade our inner mind technology to be more mindful and compassionate so that we can transform our stress into well-being. And I'll close with this quote by EO Wilson. Many years ago, he urged young scientists to go out into the world and to make choices wisely. And I'll borrow his words and encourage all of you and all of us as entrepreneurs to go as far as you can but to do it in a fearless and compassionate way because the world needs you badly. Thank you.


by the Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District. For more information, go to cbswmd.org or 802recycles.com. This material is based upon word supported under a grant by the Rural Utility Service, United States Department of Agriculture. The Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District prohibits discrimination on a basis of race, color, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, marital or family status. The Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District is an equal opportunity provider and employer.


My name is Sherwood Moore. I'm the chair of the Hyperledger Climate Action and Accounting Special Interest Group. I'll be presenting today with Bertrand Rue, who is the founder and head of Two Ravens Consulting. So today we're going to be talking about open source distributed climate accounting. I'm going to kind of kick off things with just kind of a high level about our motivation and kind of inspiration and our objectives. Bertrand's going to come in and talk about some specifics of the prototype that we've been developing. So the Climate Action Accounting Special Interest Group, we really are all motivated. I think we have very similar motivations and it's around this issue that we're failing to take action around climate. Enough action in order to meet the Paris Agreement pathway and we're continuing to put more and more carbon emissions into the atmosphere. So the question is why are we doing this? And I believe that there are kind of two key reasons. One is that we don't have a shared distributed climate accounting system that allows us to work from the same numbers. And the second component is that profit motives are not quite aligned yet. There's not enough incentive to drive corporations to really, to decarbonize and kind of apply the same kind of ruthless efficiencies that they apply to kind of driving down cost as they do to carbon. And so I'm going to be speaking a bit about our solution and I think how it touches on both. For those of you who aren't familiar, the Hyperledger Climate Action Accounting Special Interest Group, we are about 300 members. We're underneath the Hyperledger umbrella. We're focused, one of our primary focuses is this. We're focused on developing a distributed open source climate accounting system that can balance the emissions activity of the globe against the climate actions in order to achieve this net zero future. And so we're focused primarily, a lot of our work is on scope one, two and three. I'm sure you guys are familiar with it. The reason I share this is because a lot of what we're trying to do is shift corporate thinking about emissions activity. Right now corporations look at their emissions footprint and they consider it to be a liability. And what we want to do is reshape thinking a little bit to get corporations to really view it potentially as an asset. An asset for achieving a sustainable competitive advantage, moving into the future and kind of ensuring the success and health of their organization. So why? This kind of shift in thinking is that we're seeing different market forces that are emerging that are creating a new reality where corporate profitability is more directly tied to the carbon emissions of their goods and services. And then this is a phrase I believe Bertrand coined. I know he's used it quite a bit. But it's this idea of government regulation, consumer demand, green finance and financial markets kind of coming together to drive different levers to effect corporate profitability linking corporate profits to carbon emissions. And so essentially what we see is a future where decarbonization is going to be a key competitive strategy. And so to break this down a little bit into the basic building blocks, government regulation is introducing a carbon tax on certain goods imported into the European Union through the carbon border adjustment mechanism. Many of you might have heard of this. It's focused on just five key carbon intensive hard to mitigate industries. But this is an operating expense that's emerging. And for those five different industry categories, there's estimations of about $8 billion in carbon taxes that are going to be collected by 2030. So that's quite a significant amount. And you can imagine what this will look like and the pressures that it will create as this expands into other marketplaces and other kind of product categories. Another one is revenue and consumer demand for low carbon products and services is increasing. This is creating opportunities for price premiums, new product categories. The example I have here is the electric car market which reached about $208 billion this past year. So this is revenue. Another one is cost of capital. Sustainable finance is offering preferred rates to corporations that can prove they're lowering their carbon footprint. So cost of capital. And about $22 trillion will be injected into the green finance market by 2031. So these are massive movements of capital that we're seeing on the horizon. The last is market capitalization. Investors are rewarding corporations that are actively managing the risk that climate change represents. And about $130 trillion in investment capital is earmarked to be invested in corporations committed to achieving that zero. This is just from the UN Glasgow Financial Alliance that I believe happened in COP26. So we're looking at operating expense, revenue, cost of capital, market capitalization. Like this is a live blood of any corporate strategy. And the challenge right now is that in this current state companies aren't able to get a very good accurate assessment of what their carbon footprint is. And that's because emissions data, it's siloed and it's fragmented. And essentially what you have is corporations that are reaching out to their supply chain. They're kind of inviting input on the different emissions activity. This information is stored in a proprietary database. It's published once a year in a static PDF at the corporate level. So the information is just not being shared. And so this is creating key barriers to collaboration for decarbonization. There's low trust. Data isn't trusted to be accurate because it really isn't. It's following fragmented standards. There's a lack of primary data. There's no visibility into the data provenance. So you're kind of comparing apples and oranges. There's limited or no access. Again, it's siloed and centralized databases. It's reported out at the corporate level, not the product level, locked in annual reports. And there's a high cost. And that's because every single emissions activity must be measured, reported and verified. And to use the data in these siloed reports, you're waiting through an ocean of reports. It's just not really an interoperable layer of information sharing. So this is why we are focused on hyperledger. We're focused on distributed ledger technology because we think it's really the perfect solution for kind of decentralizing the ledger on which all the submission is being shared, right? So for those of you who aren't familiar, I'm sure you are, but essentially this is the perfect tool. It allows us to reach out to centralized databases to capture data, to make any calculations that need to be made, to format it, to bring it into ledger. Smart contract contracts allow us to code business logic into the system to automate value exchange. The blockchain itself provides, you know, the different... Well, hyperledger permission blockchain provides the different players in the network to kind of co-manage the databases while also protecting the sensitive information that they need to... because it's a permission network and all the players know each other within the network. And the last few pieces are distributed governance and open source technology. The entire system has governance built into it so that the participants can co-design the system together, co-manage it together. And then open source technology, this is really critical, right? Because when you look at the magnitude, the scale, the size, the complexity of capturing all the submissions activity across all these different players, everybody's going to have a different need. And so in order to build that, it really, I think, takes... and scale it in the time that we have remaining, this requires, I think, open source technology to allow everybody to contribute to building. And that's not just for the people in the parties in the supply chain. This is also for government regulators, green financiers and consumers. We need to essentially use open... take an open source approach to scale to meet the magnitude of this challenge. And so this is the future state that we're working to deliver. We developed an award-winning prototype that essentially allows for breaking down these silos. Embodied carbon emissions can now flow through a supply chain with each individual party sharing the emissions data that they're responsible for. This information provides a way for all of them to kind of share this information and break down barriers in order to kind of provide the clear data language across the supply chain. So you can see the standards that were used, whether primary data was used. You can see the policy documents and how it was measured, reported and verified. That's what we're working towards. That's what this technology promises. And so ultimately what we're trying to deliver is this efficient marketplace for environmental data. And this to allow different supply chain participants to work together to identify the hotspots, to establish vendor relationships to kind of build and walk in kind of low carbon partnerships, to explore the technologies and the processes and the solutions that can really give them a leg up and kind of get ahead in kind of establishing a competitive advantage built around low carbon emissions. And that's not just for the supply chain parties. As far as an efficient marketplace what we also want to create is a marketplace for that environmental data to be able to be used to drive incentives or capture incentives from government regulation, consumer demand, green finance and financial markets. And the idea is we can pull all these levers together. We can change the financial equation and make it a lot more financially interesting for corporations to really take a hard look at decarbonizing. So with that I'm going to hand it over to Bertrand who's going to walk through the prototype that we built in a little bit more detail. Can you hear me? Yeah? Oh, I don't know. All right. Well, first of all, thanks to everyone for joining and everyone who's here in the room today and also anyone who's joining the live stream. I really appreciate you taking the time to listen in on what we're doing. So Sherwood mentioned while I didn't coin the term measurement economy it's something I do prescribe to as a legal tender and it's becoming a very useful term in the industry to sort of explain how we're using data in this case environmental data as a driver for economic growth. And as Sherwood has mentioned, we've been developing prototypes and tooling to demonstrate this technology and function. For full disclosure a lot of this work has been using data from industry and now we're working closer with the actual industry so mostly public data they're providing to solve problems. And what I'm going to walk through with you today is how that technology can actually solve specific problems for these industry players just to give you some background. I actually come from the energy industry, worked for many years in that space both in only gas and electricity and trying to work through some of the internal problems they have in managing their environmental data, specifically emissions data. And I've developed a thinking and a lot of this is actually thanks to some of the conversations I had with Kyle who's here with us today and I know they've done a lot of work on this idea of verifiable credentials and getting information about organizations. So we look at this from two perspectives as far as how can we apply DLT to this environmental data market for environmental data. The first is the vertical lens right and this is really looking into the organization. What are the VCs that this organization holds? Are they a standard registry? Are they a project proponent that's operating within some set of standards? Are they a VVB, a validation verification body? They audit and validate. What credentials do they have to do that? It's really looking at the policy documents or the framework under which an MRV, a measurement reporting verification system functions for an organization. The second component here where we see applications of DLT is in the horizontal and here we're talking about the market instruments within the measurement economy, offset credits, performance certification. How do we differentiate the commodities that organizations are producing with respect to their greenhouse gas impact? And this really gets down to, as opposed to looking vertically at the organization, tracking results across organizations. So when we talk about this vertical optics, what are we asking? So we're trying to identify who is operating in the data marketplace. And what we're looking as far as applying solutions is assigning unique digital identifiers. This is something that the BC government is working heavily on locally on how do we issue digital credentials for individuals or even for organizations. And I know Kyle has a presentation about this I think later, maybe tomorrow. And the second question here is where are these operators credentials, where do they come from? They need to be discoverable. Most of the policy documents that are linked to these verifiable credentials issued to the organization. And how do we identify links to the trusted institutions and processes on which these VCs operate? So we have this sort of system of managing identities. This is the one area we're working on. How can we apply this solution? I'll talk a little bit about the actual technology that we're using and some of the existing solutions that we're building on top of to realize these gains or these solutions. So now getting back to the second component on the horizontal optics. The first question is who are the offtakers of environmental data? So an organization has its VCs, it audits and verifies its emission data. It's the consumer of that data, right? Now you have another organization in the supply chain. So we're looking at here's far solutions are developing contractual agreements to enable these transactions between the VCs of an organization, these credentials of the organization. And what are these impacts through these cross-organizational transfers? And this gets to the core sort of solution space that we're working in, which is tracking the value chain, often called the scope three impacts of emission profiles across organizations. So we have in this diagram below kind of tying these things together. We have the vertical VCs for organizations that are used to generate emission profiles and then a marketplace for exchanging that information through to the emission profile of another organization with its own VCs. So we fry this sort of visibility. So the solution space you're building as far as the business model, how we think about this. So again we can break this down into two components, the vertical and the horizontal. So we have the MRV policy marketplace. So there are companies that make a business off of establishing standard registries and these different processes of issuing verifiable credentials. So you have industry that engages with various PVVs. Some examples get to later, but you've got the ISO, the International Organization of Standards, that issues a variety of different credentials for verification bodies and a variety of registries. Vera, for example, has a big issue of offset credits. So they operate in this space. The second component is the emissions data market. Sherwood has already spoken to this, the development of ESG and sustainable finance and consumers of that data. I spoke about value chain reporting and commodity differentiation. So this is, again, the horizontal, the business model we're looking at. Now what have we built so far? And this is an ongoing open source project. If you're interested in looking at the tech, you can just search blockchain carbon accounting online and it should direct you towards our GitHub page. But what we've been working on are these, break it down to these three core components. Data pooling solutions where we can take proprietary enterprise data and sort of connect that into a verification tool, set of tools, set of tools for emissions verification and then compiling those into emission profiles, taking these verifiable credentials and putting them into these emission profile wrappers that can be issued as digital assets. And then those operate within this measurement economy where we have the various actors, corporations, you know, green finance, players in the green finance space, as Sherwood spoke to previously. So what we built, so Sherwood mentioned, you know, we had won some awards for initial prototype development. This was, there were two elements to that. One under the IBM call for code green challenge practice accelerator would develop the system for tracking value chain emissions across supply chain and also a submission to the hyper ledger challenge in 20, both of these in 2022. So there's some links in the slides here. Not sure if the slides will be shared, but happy to send them out to anyone who's interested. A lot of this information can be found through the hyper ledger carbon accounting special interest group. There are links in the back over there. And happy to share it with you after the presentation as well. So identity and digital credentials, the vertical emission data channels which sort of break down the vertical and the horizontal of communicating, aggregating information for the organization so it can be verified and then feeding into these horizontal objects. We developed, we've been working on this network called any team and emissions token network where we construct these profiles and I'll just end the presentation in a couple slides with a breakdown of what that looks like as far as the horizontal component. So diving into the architecture of what we built. So I spoke about data aggregation on the far left hand side of the slide. You see essentially the components that go into this part of the architecture the technology stack where we're essentially providing a variety of Oracle services which Sherwood mentioned to aggregate data from mobile, web or say ERP data feeds. And then continuing on this sort of vertical optics, we have systems for managing data about organizations and converting all of these data sources into useful information. Through private data channels we're working on hyper ledger fabric developing hyper ledger fabric network to manage enterprise data. Working also on conceptualizing a DAO where data can be submitted to registries matching data to VVBs and also funding pools for these auditors that are processing this data and finally issuing verified credentials and then finally the horizontal which I've spoken to already where the data is packaged into emissions data, sorry, emission token profiles. So I already mentioned hyper ledger fabric on the technology stack side. So in this case hyper ledger fabric is a permission network and we're focusing on its use cases for processing high volumes of data by VVBs and standard registries. We also have a mix of different emission token networks we're working with. We've set up a system to deploy our NET network which I mentioned previously on hyper ledger BESU. We're also working with Hedera Hashgraph. They have the Guardian protocol which is a very useful toolkit for managing MRV policy documentation and for establishing a token marketplace. We've also launched our code on some other public networks like Avalanche and Binance. So actually missing from this slide I think we had done some revisions but didn't get pulled through the latest version. There are a couple other projects that we're working with and I wanted to mention today. One is Origin Trail which was a project started in 2019. This is essentially developing a knowledge graph for publishing assets on a distributed ledger and one of the companies they're working with is the largest issuer of ISO certificates in the world, BSI, the British Standards Institute. ISO certification plays a really important role obviously in the VVB space for environmental data and we're actually right now looking at how to manage ISO certification for internal auditors of say energy companies that are managing or doing carbon accounting practices to publish those verifiable credentials of those auditors on a network that can enable them to then audit and publish their data to provide sort of this idea of discoverability and visibility that other organizations come and say okay I'm buying products from this organization with an internal auditor and I have sort of proof or confidence that their data has been audited up to a specific standard for example ISO. Now there are a lot of other companies, I mentioned BSI which deals with ISO certification that play a role in these certification and standard registries. So one of the values of using like Origin Trail this knowledge graph is that you can publish verifiable credentials on a discoverable ledger from a variety of organizations tied to an individual or representative organization. So you know you could use one could say okay you could do this with a standard centralized database while a distributed system allows you to collate all this information from a variety of different certification bodies. The last thing on the slide so I digress a little bit we've been working with the hyper ledger cactus or cacti community which is primarily focused on interoperability. So I mentioned a lot of different networks here so within our technology how do we enable sort of these systems to communicate and hyper ledger cactus, the open source project has been very very useful in that regard. So I'm going to close up the slide just again talking about the horizontal optics. This is a specific project that I've been working on and how I got involved with the hyper ledger carbon accounting group and that's really how do we track emission profiles for an organization across the supply chain and essentially what we've been developing since the end of 2021 and 2022 and it was a part of this submission to the accelerator that we won an award for on the hyper ledger challenge was designing this non-fungible token wrapper which essentially it's taking all of these verifier credentials that describe the emissions profile of our organization and how that data was derived into a wrapper that describes sort of these product emission impacts or product footprint for an organization and enables this NFT wrapper, enables the communication of that data across different organizations. This profile is just an aggregation of different data whether it's audited emissions data, retired emission tokens which represent realized greenhouse gas emissions or credits that they've purchased or issued and then we've got these output carbon tracker tokens which essentially represents products because when you're talking about the flow of emissions data, companies aren't really when you talk about what companies are trade or exchanging, they're not really trading emissions data, right? There is an exchange of emissions, they're exchanging products when you're talking about scope 3 so the carbon tracker component of this product is really representing those product flows. I'm not going to go into detail the functioning, I'd be happy to talk with people after about how it works but this is essentially the high level view of the design we've developed. Yeah, so just wrapping it up this NFT certificate ecosystem within the scope 3 reporting space essentially is designed to provide this flow of information across from primary producer whether it's energy or commodities through the intermediaries and the final consumer with these NFTs representing this sort of anchor point registry of emission profile data that all of these different entities in the supply chain can refer to that have a visible and trusted scope 3 impact assessment. Yeah, so our last slide here is just some opportunities on how you can get involved with the community so we mentioned some of the pilots we're working on we have a variety of engagements we're currently setting up developing go to market strategies writing reports so if you're interested in participating on that happy to accommodate or have some conversations with you we're doing a variety of different research projects including both financial analysis on the impact of the major economy for an industry specific industry player we're seeking grant funding also to continue open source development work under this blockchain carbon accounting project we mentioned we're also looking to transition that into hopefully a hyper ledger project and we also have bimonthly meetings under the carbon accounting special interest group again the links are there in the back you can easily find it online if you do a search the meetings happen I think every second Tuesday of the month or every other Tuesday whenever that falls and we also have a specific peer programming calls that occur on Mondays also twice a month as needed you know as the project picks up so I mean that's I don't need to drive into the addendum but that's our presentation for today happy to take in your questions and continue the conversation after the session thank you


The Ministry of Health and Wellness on Tuesday 2 February 2021 confirmed 68 new cases of COVID-19. These results were derived from the testing done on Sunday January 31, 2021 and on Monday February 1, 2021, where 38 positives and 30 positives were recorded, respectively. This is from a total of 900 COVID-19 samples processed by the Ezra Long Laboratory, of which 832 were negative. The sample period ranges from January 22 to January 31, 2021. Dr. Sharon Belmar-George is the Chief Medical Officer. All of the cases are St. Lucia Nationals who range in age from 7 to 75 years and are from Grosjele castries, Miku, Bavano, Ancelary, Viewfort and the Denver Districts. They were tested at various points of care and placed in quarantine by health practitioners while awaiting their COVID-19 test results. Arrangements are now being made for the placement of these individuals into isolation. On Monday February 1, 2021, the Ministry of Health and Wellness received confirmation of its 16th COVID-19 related death. The individual is a 61-year-old male from the castries district with multiple underlying illnesses. He had presented to a health care facility where he was tested for COVID-19. On Wednesday, January 20, 2021, he was admitted at the respiratory hospital and passed away on February 1, 2021. The Ministry of Health extends sympathy to the family and loved ones of this individual. As at 6pm on Tuesday 2 February 2021, the Ministry of Health and Wellness reported a total of 1,479 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in country, 757 of these are active cases and 706 of these cases have recovered. Two cases remain in critical care and the others in hospital and home-based care are all stable.