An Operating System For Trust

IBM’S BLOCKCHAIN SOLUTIONS ARE CREATING SPACES FOR SECURE TRANSACTIONS AND DATA SHARING.

- Laura Close

Whether you like it or not, there’s a lot of your personal information whirling around out in the ether. As hard as you may try to limit what information people can reach— we’re looking at you, Ron Swansons of the world—there’s always going to be another hack or event that exposes things you may not want seen, like your medical records.

Think about it: the government holds your SSN and driver’s license information, as well as addresses, tax details, and more; universities keep transcripts of your performance from earlier in life; and your job knows just about as much about you as the government does. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

“Hospitals and doctors exchange health information all the time, but it should be the case that every time they do they have to come to me first,” said Ramesh Gopinath, Vice President, Block chain Solutions and Research at IBM. “Information about all of us is spread out in many different places. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a sense of identity that cuts across all of the different entities that hold onto bits of you? A decentralized, self-sovereign identity? Block chain makes this possible.”

That concept—for both individuals and companies alike—is powerful and intriguing to IBM and Gopinath. He joined the company as a research staff member for speech recognition research in 1994 after completing his doctoral and postdoctoral work at Rice University.

He worked his way up through the ranks, managing and directing the company’s Cloud Services research agenda within IBM Research, and then moved back to India to manage the country’s arm of IBM Research. Today, Gopinath is in charge of what he refers to as the “industry transforming IBM block chain solutions” the company is leveraging out of the Thomas J. Watson Research Center.