This lecture took place on June 23, 2021.
The Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative is a global and multi-stakeholder project working to co-design blockchain-based standards for the connected mobility ecosystem. The project engages stakeholders across the mobility value chain, including original equipment manufacturers, mobility service providers, technology companies, and governmental and non-governmental entities.
The objective of the panel discussion is to introduce to listeners the use case review of end to end parts traceability – complexity, problems, value propositions, and the role of co-opetition – followed by a high level overview of reference implementation architecture and how it leverages blockchain/DLT, vehicle identity, and other primitives. Finally, the panelists will describe the contribution of the reference implementation to the industry.
Join us on Wednesday, June 23, to hear their value propositions and innovations in the automotive supply chain by using blockchain/DLT and the work of MOBI to create standards for the deployment of multi-party supply chain parts traceability applications.
About the Speakers
Thad Dungan (Panelist) serves as worldwide head of Automotive at AWS based in Seattle, WA. He has a long background in automotive and tech, working closely with big auto to help transform their businesses by leveraging AWS. Prior to his current role, he was Head of Americas for HERE Technologies in the Automotive Group. A seasoned enterprise software executive, he has more than 20 years of product marketing, product management and general management experience. He has worked in various roles at SAP SE and Manugistics (BlueYonder) including Head of Operations, Vice President of Strategic Customer Engagement, Vice President of Product Management, and Vice President of Solution Consulting. Mr. Dungan also served in various supply chain leadership roles at General Motors and General Motors South America (Brazil) including vehicle logistics, program management and readiness, and strategic sourcing. He also currently serves as a board director for NovoDynamics, a Big Data and Advanced Analytics company in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Pramita Mitra (Panelist) is a Research Supervisor for IoT and Blockchain at Ford. Dr. Mitra is a Supervisor and Technical Expert in IoT and Blockchain Applications at Ford Motor Company Research and Advanced Engineering division in Michigan. She leads a cross-functional team to develop secure and robust solutions for smart factories of the future. Dr. Mitra earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Notre Dame in 2013. She received the Outstanding Paper Award at the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) World Congress 2019 for her work on preventing data privacy leakage in connected vehicle services. Dr. Mitra received the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) Detroit Section Technical Award in 2017, the WE Local New ELiTE (Emerging Leader in Technology and Engineering) Award in 2020, and the SWE Patent Recognition Award, also in 2020. She co-chairs the Supply Chain Working Group in the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI), a non-profit consortium of major automakers, suppliers and blockchain technology partners. Dr. Mitra holds 14 US Patents to date.
Rajat Rajbhandari, PhD (Moderator) is a working group lead for MOBI. In this role, he leads the standards development for Vehicle Identity and Supply Chain working groups. He is also a co-founder of dexFreight, a startup building a decentralized logistics platform for shippers and carriers to collaborate using blockchain and smart contracts. He is also leading a project at Port of Veracruz to build Latin America’s first blockchain powered port community system. Prior to dexFreight, he spent 13+ years as a research engineer at Texas A&M Transportation Institute. He has been interviewed and covered by Wall Street Journal, Dallas Innovates, Port Technology, USA Today, FreightWaves, Journal of Commerce, Internal Business Times, etc. He is also a recent author of A Book about Blockchain: How companies can Leap into the future by adopting blockchain. He has a doctorate degree in transportation system and lives in Dallas, Texas.
Johannes Sedlmeir (Panelist) is a research assistant at FIM Research Center and a doctoral student at University of Bayreuth. He is working on projects in the public, mobility and energy sector that leverage decentralized technologies for improving efficiency, security, and transparency. In his research, he focuses on performance measurements for permissioned blockchains, the energy consumption of public and private blockchains, decentralized digital identity management (“self-sovereign identity”) as basis for the regulatory compliant usage of blockchains, and the capabilities of zero-knowledge proofs for improving scalability and privacy of blockchain-based architectures. Johannes is the author of the VID Reference Implementation Architecture.