Tribune News Network
Doha
Qatar University’s (QU) College of Engineering (CENG) and TASMU Innovation Lab (i-Lab) held the second industrial stakeholders’ workshop at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) headquarters, titled ‘Blockchain Technology in Supply Chains Stakeholders Workshop’, gathering executives from majors technology providers organizations as well as information technology and business academics. The workshop focused on showcasing the recent developments on blockchain research frameworks and its applications in the context of industry supply chains.
The workshop was inaugurated by Eman Al-Kuwari, acting section head of Emerging Technology, MCIT, and Dr Khalid Kamal Naji, dean of CENG. They emphasized, during their speeches, the importance of collaboration between higher education institutions, industry sector and government. They also highlighted the growing needs of exploitation/commercialization of the research findings by the relevant stakeholders, including technology services providers, end-users, regulators and policy makers.
Dr Munir Tag, advisor at MCIT, delivered the welcome speech highlighting the contribution of the TASMU Innovation Lab in the digital transformation of the society in Qatar by making partnership between academia, industry and government in different sectors. He also presented the TASMU programme that comprises five use cases, namely health, logistics, transport, environment and sport.
During the keynote session, Adnan Al-Banna, manager of Support Services, Milaha, talked about digital supply chain resilience and its importance. He highlighted the efforts made by Milaha in the digital transformation field, and particularly in cybersecurity and blockchain adoption, leading to Milaha certification by ISO27001 and National Information Assurance.
Dr Ali Alaboudy, senior expert - ICT, QNRF/QRDI, introduced the efforts of QNRF/QRDI Council in supporting disruptive technologies.
Dr Abdelaziz Bouras, PreAward manager, Office of Research, QU, presented the SupplyLedger NPRP11S-1227-170135 project (www.supplyledger.qa) and its achievements and outcomes, such as blockchain integration process, patents and scientific publications.
The workshop also included a roundtable, where participants discussed blockchain. During the round-table, Mohammed Al-Hashimi, chief technlogy officer, CISCO, stated that blockchain has many important aspects such as a tracking aspect that CISCO is using to track every bit of detail of a product, in a sustainable way.
Dr Mazen Al-Masri, CEO Genesis Technologies – Ass. Prof. QU, highlighted the importance of awareness about adopting blockchain. He stressed that the lack of adoption in the local context is due to the lack of technological talent and the lack of regulation clarity related to blockchain.
Ibrahim Baddad, senior managing consultant, IBM; Dr Karma Sherif, professor at QU; Mehdi Ben Moussa, Data and AI specialist, Microsoft; and Dr Ibrahim Khalil, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia also explained various aspects of blockchain technology.
The moderators concluded the round-table by thanking the participants and hoping that Qatari industry get more involvement in the acceleration of the ongoing digital transformation and blockchain improvement.