The competitive IBM Faculty award, was granted to Alysson Bessani. This prize is awarded to Professors from the best Universities around the world, suggested by IBM Research investigators and then assessed internally at the company.

The grant aims to enable LaSIGE / DI-FCUL researchers to collaborate on the Linux foundation’s Hyperledger project, in which IBM, Intel and dozens of other companies collaborate to build blockchain technologies for business.

In a recent interview Dr. Christian Cachin, from IBM Research Zurich, has described the objectives and reasons for the collaboration in an interview to the IBM Research Blog:

“… IBM has recently granted a Faculty Award to Prof. Alysson Bessani at the University of Lisbon, who is a world-class expert in building BFT consensus protocols. He has already realized the BFT-SMaRt toolkit for implementing BFT consensus over the Internet. It is the state-of-the-art solution available today for this task, and the only open-source project developing BFT consensus, prior to the Hyperledger Fabric.
Through our collaboration we want to achieve two goals: First we will adapt BFT-SMaRt to Hyperledger Fabric so that it can provide consensus for a Hyperledger blockchain. Second, we engage in joint research between IBM Research – Zurich and his group to assess and improve the scalability and performance of consensus protocols for blockchain. Of course, we look forward to other interested teams joining the development of blockchain consensus for Hyperledger Fabric as well.”