3,809 research outputs found
Blockchain For Food: Making Sense of Technology and the Impact on Biofortified Seeds
The global food system is under pressure and is in the early stages of a major transition towards more transparency, circularity, and personalisation. In the coming decades, there is an increasing need for more food production with fewer resources. Thus, increasing crop yields and nutritional value per crop is arguably an important factor in this global food transition.
Biofortification can play an important role in feeding the world. Biofortified seeds create produce with increased nutritional values, mainly minerals and vitamins, while using the same or less resources as non-biofortified variants. However, a farmer cannot distinguish a biofortified seed from a regular seed. Due to the invisible nature of the enhanced seeds, counterfeit products are common, limiting wide-scale adoption of biofortified crops. Fraudulent seeds pose a major obstacle in the adoption of biofortified crops.
A system that could guarantee the origin of the biofortified seeds is therefore required to ensure widespread adoption. This trust-ensuring immutable proof for the biofortified seeds, can be provided via blockchain technology
A Blockchain-based Approach for Data Accountability and Provenance Tracking
The recent approval of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes
new data protection requirements on data controllers and processors with
respect to the processing of European Union (EU) residents' data. These
requirements consist of a single set of rules that have binding legal status
and should be enforced in all EU member states. In light of these requirements,
we propose in this paper the use of a blockchain-based approach to support data
accountability and provenance tracking. Our approach relies on the use of
publicly auditable contracts deployed in a blockchain that increase the
transparency with respect to the access and usage of data. We identify and
discuss three different models for our approach with different granularity and
scalability requirements where contracts can be used to encode data usage
policies and provenance tracking information in a privacy-friendly way. From
these three models we designed, implemented, and evaluated a model where
contracts are deployed by data subjects for each data controller, and a model
where subjects join contracts deployed by data controllers in case they accept
the data handling conditions. Our implementations show in practice the
feasibility and limitations of contracts for the purposes identified in this
paper
On the Convergence of Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) Technologies
The Internet of Things (IoT) technology will soon become an integral part of
our daily lives to facilitate the control and monitoring of processes and
objects and revolutionize the ways that human interacts with the physical
world. For all features of IoT to become fully functional in practice, there
are several obstacles on the way to be surmounted and critical challenges to be
addressed. These include, but are not limited to cybersecurity, data privacy,
energy consumption, and scalability. The Blockchain decentralized nature and
its multi-faceted procedures offer a useful mechanism to tackle several of
these IoT challenges. However, applying the Blockchain protocols to IoT without
considering their tremendous computational loads, delays, and bandwidth
overhead can let to a new set of problems. This review evaluates some of the
main challenges we face in the integration of Blockchain and IoT technologies
and provides insights and high-level solutions that can potentially handle the
shortcomings and constraints of both IoT and Blockchain technologies.Comment: Includes 11 Pages, 3 Figures, To publish in Journal of Strategic
Innovation and Sustainability for issue JSIS 14(1
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