Speaker Bios

Prof. Brian Fitzgerald

Brian Fitzgerald is Director of Lero – the Irish Software Research Centre. He also holds an endowed professorship, the Krehbiel Chair in Innovation in Business & Technology, at the University of Limerick, and served as Vice President Research at UL from 2008-2011. His publications include 15 books, and over 150 peer-reviewed articles in the leading international journals and conferences in both the Information Systems and Software Engineering fields.  Prior to taking up an academic position, he worked in the software industry for about 12 years. 

Prof. Roman Beck

Roman Beck is full professor in the Business IT department at the IT University of Copenhagen. With a background as an economist and a PhD in information systems from the University of Frankfurt, his research is predominantly on Blockchain economics. He is Head of the European Blockchain Center, Head of the Danish delegation to ISO TC 307 “Blockchain & DLT” as well as Convenor at ISO to standardize “Blockchain Governance”.

Prof. Johannes Ahlmann

Johannes Ahlmann is the Chief Technology Officer of iLen, an Irish company delivering product traceability to consumers using blockchain in the dairy and food industry. He previously founded Fluquid, a services company crawling and leveraging web data, worked as Head of Data Science at Scrapinghub, as Head of IT at ACO Group and as Senior IT Consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton. Since early 2017 he has focused on finding and developing affordable end-to-end blockchain solutions using Ethereum, Hyperledger, IPFS, and BigchainDB.

Oliver Kemmis

Oliver Kemmis has spent the last 15 years working on innovative communication services for the financial industry. In this space he delivered some of the first mobile email and mobile recording solutions back in 1999. 

Oliver is currently the Founder of comitFS - a leading provider of Computer Telephony Integration to the financial services. Additionally Oliver is the founder of Globility who deliver telephony bridging solutions to the major financial voice networks. Most recently Oliver has become the chair of the Distributed Communications working group for the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance and also the co-founder of the ComChain Alliance - researching how communication can be delivered using blockchain technology whilst maintaining a strong focus on regulation, compliance and security. 

Emanuele Ragnoli

Emanuele Ragnoli is a Research Staff Member and a Technical Lead of the blockchain group in IBM Research – Ireland. He has 10+ years of experience in the real time implementation and control of large scale systems, ranging from their security to their systems theory design and analysis.  Emanuele's research interests are in probability theory (randomness, stochastic processes), distributed computing (consensus) and cryptology. Currently he is investigating the application of advanced randomness to blockchain technologies to enhance their performance and scalability on distributed platforms.

Pearse Ryan

Pearse Ryan is a partner in the Technology & Innovation Group in Arthur Cox.  Pearse practices across a range of technology related areas, including IT projects, outsourcing, cloud computing, cyber security and Fintech.  Pearse has a strong interest in risk management and innovation.  Traditionally this was applied in the project and contract areas, but in recent years Pearse has extended his interest to broader corporate risk management, focusing on the related areas of cyber/data incident management, and cyber/data insurance.  Also, Pearse is a lead in the firms FinTech practice, working on blockchain projects, token offerings, crypto based trading and the many original questions posed by this new area.  Pearse is a frequent writer and speaker in the areas of cyber risk management and FinTech, including recurring speaking slots with the Incorporated Law Society of Ireland (PPCII and Diploma courses) and The Honorable Society of King’s Inns (Advanced Diploma in White Collar Crime).  Pearse was a part-time lecturer 2015/2016 on the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School MSc in Global Services Management and is a lecturer 2017/2018 on the National College of Ireland new MSc in FinTech.

Hitesh Tewari

Hitesh Tewari is an assistant professor in Trinity College Dublin where he heads a small group of researchers working in the areas of network security and cryptography. In 1997 he co-authored a book entitled “Electronic Payment Systems” which was a best seller in its category and he went on to publish a second edition in 2001. He is currently very active in the area of blockchain technologies. According to some Internet articles there is a small probability that he may be “satoshi”.

Pavel Tarasov

Pavel Tarasov has recently graduated with an M.Sc. in computer science from Trinity College Dublin where the topic of his research was electronic voting with blockchains. In 2017 he has published 2 papers on this topic and won best paper award at the IADIS conference in the same year. He continues to work in the area of blockchain technologies outside his work in the public sector.