The Iota Foundation and Imperial College London recently announced the launch of a four-year distributed ledger technology, or DLT, initiative designed to research and develop solutions to foster socially conscious, circular economic models and businesses around servitization.
The Imperial-Iota-Infrastructures Lab, known as the I3-Lab, will operate within the Dyson School of Design Engineering and has adopted the tagline “infrastructure powered by Iota; analytics powered by Imperial; use-cases powered by the community; and impact powered by partnerships.”
Expected to commence this summer, the I3-Lab has been initially funded by a $1 million philanthropic grant from the Iota Foundation and will soon become a co-funded project following an undisclosed contribution from ICL described as “substantial.”
Two post-doctoral researchers and five Ph.D. students, overseen by project leaders, will focus their efforts on five projects spanning an array of proposed subjects including tire emissions in the mobility space, ethical batteries in the energy industry, and an infrastructure project to develop the underlying technologies around digital twin and DLT, in addition to two open calls with the aspiration to engage the broader ICL community and attain internal funding.
The lab, which is currently under construction, is approximately the size, if not a fraction larger, than the goal area of a soccer field. Architectural plans reveal intentions to construct a second-story mezzanine overlooking the ground floor, so as to provide ample space for the seven students and their necessary equipment.
Cointelegraph’s Tom Farren visited Imperial College London and spoke to Robert Shorten, deputy director of the Dyson School Engineering Design; Peter Cheung, head of the Dyson School of Design Engineering; and Navin Ramachandran, a member of the board of directors at Iota, about a wide range of topics, from tire emissions and the Jevons paradox to tokenomic incentivize models, Iota’s proposed governance ambitions and the behavioral impact of coins in shopping carts.
This interview has been condensed and edited for greater clarity.
GM from @imperialcollege @ImperialDyson @iota
Interview time! ✍ pic.twitter.com/Fk8FxXWF02
— Tom Farren ☮️ (@tomfarrencrypto) February 16, 2022
Cointelegraph: What were the specific reasons for partnering with Iota on this project?
Peter Cheung: The reason why we’re so interested in Iota with the I3-Lab is because they are aligned with our values. It is a technology-driven area, but our department has the mission to make a difference in society and humanity. And this is a technology that we believe will have a significant impact in the future, and therefore, we want to invest in it.
Robert Shorten: “Traditionally, blockchain-type technologies have been used in fintech as a means of payment, or for tracking goods and services. We’re really interested in exploring the behavioral intervention side.
A big issue in the sharing economy is the idea of being able to manage risk. The risk of someone not doing what they said they were going to do. For example, if you’re in a shared vehicle, it should be returned at a certain time, and if someone doesn’t do that, then it undermines the whole sharing concept.
“The idea of managing the risk of misusing of an asset, rather than managing the access to the asset, is very subtle thing but actually a really important part of the sharing economy in these new models of ownership.”
CT: How do you envision the way Iota’s feeless structure could support these new models of ownership?
Navin Ramachandran: When you’re working in a feeless environment, how do you do it with fair distribution? The issue we’ve had, and a lot of projects have had, is that things make sense from a research perspective, but when implemented, the algorithms are so complex that they break very easily or the processing takes too long and it becomes very heavy.
PC: Or it may not be scalable,…
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