Jessica Wolf |
One of the biggest champions of blockchain technology on the UCLA campus is a humanities professor — specifically David MacFadyen, professor of musicology who is currently serving as chair of the comparative literature department.
As part of UCLA’s Blockchain Lab, MacFadyen has curated “Cyber Days,” a series of talks and workshops Feb. 17–18 in the Humanities Building that brings a group of tech leaders to campus to explore and enlighten the UCLA community around the creative potential of blockchain technology.
Blockchain is a secure, peer-to-peer technology platform made up of a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked, explained Bhagwan Chowdhry, professor of finance who teaches the university’s only blockchain-related course in the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
“Each successive block refers to a cryptographic fingerprint of the previous block,” Chowdhry said. “Even the smallest attempt at modifying any record is detected and rejected by a consensus mechanism that keeps identical copies of the blocks on many computers distributed around the world.”