This panel discussion took place on February 24, 2021.
The Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative Vehicle Identity working group is a global and multi-stakeholder project working to co-design blockchain and distributed ledger technologies based standards for connected mobility ecosystems. This project engages stakeholders across the mobility value chain, including original equipment manufacturers, mobility industry service providers, technology companies, governmental and non-governmental entities.
Listen to the Co-Chairs of the VID working group and Author of MOBI VID Technical Specifications Standard share their value propositions, insights on mobility derived from the new vehicle identity, and the work of MOBI to create standards for the deployment of VID on blockchain.
About the Panelists & Moderator
Alan Gordon (Panelist) is Technical Leader at Ford Motor Company’s Research Center in Palo Alto, CA. He has worked in the software industry for 23 years in a wide variety of domains including: active noise control, ophthalmic medical devices, navigation, location-based services for smartphones, and optical character recognition and data extraction. Alan has written two books on software development for Prentice Hall and published papers on active noise control in the Journal of the Acoustic Society of America. He started his blockchain journey in 2016 using Bitcoin to buy fake IDs to use as test data during the development of a mobile SDK to detect fake IDs. At Ford, Alan led an effort to develop a vehicle identity and history proof of concept using Ethereum. Alan serves as a co-chair of the MOBI VID Working Group.
Johannes Klepsch (Panelist) is a Product Owner for DLT Consulting and Collaboration at BMW Group. In his role, he advises BMW departments for the adoption of blockchain use cases, and drives collaboration with stakeholders in the mobility ecosystem. Johannes holds a PhD in Mathematics from Technical University Munich. He has a background in data science and is excited by the opportunities decentralization brings to machine learning and mobility. Johannes is a co-chair of the MOBI VID Working Group.
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.