Blockchain could revolutionize the oil and gas industry, but there are several open research challenges hindering its successful implementation. 

Legacy systems, approaches, and technologies leveraged for managing oil and gas supply-chain operations fall short of providing operational transparency, traceability, audit, security, and trusted–data-provenance features. They also tend to be centralized, manual, and not integrated, which make them vulnerable to manipulation and the single-point-of-failure problem.

A Khalifa University team researched the issue and found reason to be excited for blockchain technology’s potential in the industry. But there are challenges ahead despite the fact that the industry has already begun adopting blockchain solutions.

Dr. Raja Ahmad, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Prof. Khaled Salah, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Dr. Raja Jayaraman, Associate Professor, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Dr. Ibrar Yaqoob, Research Scientist, and Dr. Mohammed Omar, Chair of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, have investigated the use of blockchain in the oil and gas industry, analyzing the applications, challenges and future trends of this technology in one of the world’s most important industries. Their research was published in.

Industry players believe digital technologies could boost their productivity by 10 to 15 percent. Trading of oil and gas products, such as gasoline and diesel, is a highly standardized and quality-sensitive process that requires high security, privacy and fast data processing, but the majority of systems that currently exist to monitor and manage this trade are centralized, unreliable and non-transparent.

Blockchain, however, is a secure, distributed ledger of transactions that uses cryptographic hash algorithms, which the researchers believe can make oil and gas operations more efficient, transparent, and trustworthy.

A Shell, BP, and Statoil research study estimates that adopting blockchain could reduce the oil and gas industry’s transaction-execution time by 30 percent, Dr. Yaqoob said.

Blockchain offers an immutable and tamper-proof ledger, where each record created forms a block, and each block is confirmed by the community among which the platform is shared before it can be paired up with the previous entry in the chain. The blockchain is a shared database, validated by a wider community rather than a central authority, making it a public ledger that cannot be easily tampered with, as no one person can go back and change things.

Many blockchain solutions use programmable smart contracts – simple programs that can be used to automatically exchange information under predetermined conditions.

Dr. Yaqoob said. “More specifically, blockchain assists in securing and simplifying oil and gas trading, shipment tracking, inventory control, documentation, and billing and payments. It simplifies the unwieldy and complex supply chain processes by introducing transparency to the involved business processes.”

The researchers say blockchain technology uses resource-efficient consensus algorithms and irreversible hashing-based data encryption methods to secure the data and transactions relating to this industry. However, the successful adoption of blockchain technology into the oil and gas industry is affected by many factors, including immature and globally differing blockchain standards, which need to be standardized across the world for such an international industry. Additionally, blockchain technology has a high implementation cost, and legal and regulatory frameworks for blockchain need to be built.

Additionally, the computing processes behind blockchain require a large amount of energy and computing resources to unlock the mathematical challenges of building each block. The energy demands result in increased carbon-dioxide emissions, so finding a more energy-efficient mining process is a crucial research challenge.

Dr. Yaqoob said. “While there are many open challenges still hindering its implementation, we present these as future research directions, and believe there are several systems using blockchain-based smart contracts that can greatly improve critical services in the oil and gas industry.”

Jade Sterling
Science Writer
22 June 2022

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Dr. Yaqoob joins an elite of researchers setting the pace for fresh and pioneering research.

Dr. Ibrar Yaqoob, Research Scientist in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Khalifa University, has been listed as one of the most influential researchers in the world by Clarivate.  

Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers List 2021 recognizes researchers for their contributions to innovation in science, social science, and citation analysis. The list ��ݮ��Ƶ the most influential researchers who have published multiple papers frequently cited by their peers and have ranked in the top 1% of citations in their field in the Web of Science in the last decade, from 2010-2020. 

Being included in the list is a huge achievement, especially at such a young age. Dr. Yaqoob, 32, notes, “Being acknowledged as a highly cited researcher worldwide based on scientific achievements by Clarivate-Web of Science less than five years after PhD graduation is truly a great honor and an immense pleasure. It is also a worldwide recognition for my research team, which is led by Prof. Khaled Salah.”

Dr. Yaqoob has been conducting cutting-edge research in the fields of Mobile Edge/Cloud Computing, Big Data, IoT, Blockchain, and Computer Networks. Life of a researcher requires a lot and he has devoted his time, intellectual effort, technical skills, commitment, and even conceded personal sacrifices to ensure his work consistently demonstrates relevant and innovative research. 

“I encourage the KU community to conduct research on hot topics and publish their findings in prestigious venues on time. Time and publication venues are two key factors. To think out of the box, it is important to have a deep understanding of what is already inside the box. This can only be achieved if one has a good understanding of the coursework,” Dr. Yaqoob advised. 

“I encourage KU students to pay careful attention and full devotion to the coursework as it will lead them from the known to the unknown–research problem. Research collaborations with influential researchers and domain experts are equally important as they can lead to combining expertise and resources that assist in solving bigger and more complex scientific problems,” he added. 

Clarivate provides insights and analytics to accelerate the pace of innovation. Its Highly Cited Researchers are from more than 1,300 institutions all over the world, promoting recognition and support for these research institutions as they evaluate and plan their strategies to accelerate the advancement of their research programs. 

Ara Maj Cruz
Creative Writer
13 January 2022

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The blockchain oracle problem is one of the most important barriers to overcome if smart contracts can be used to their full potential, and Khalifa University is leading the way in research. 

Blockchain offers an immutable and tamper-proof ledger, where each record created forms a block, and each block is confirmed by the community among which the platform is shared before it can be paired up with the previous entry in the chain. The blockchain is a shared database, validated by a wider community rather than a central authority, making it a public ledger that cannot be easily tampered with, as no one person can go back and change things.

Many blockchain solutions use programmable smart contracts­ – simple programs that can be used to automatically exchange information under predetermined conditions. The paper notes, “With the advent of smart contracts, the benefits of decentralization offered by distributed ledger technologies could be implemented in sectors other than cryptocurrencies, such as healthcare, supply chains, and finance. Smart contracts, however, need oracles to fetch data from the real world, which do not offer the same characteristics of decentralization as blockchain.”

The blockchain oracle problem is an interesting one. The term ‘oracle’ comes from Greek mythology and refers to someone able to see the future. In ancient stories, people turned to oracles for knowledge beyond their understanding, and in the blockchain world, oracles are systems that provide the blockchain with information from the real world.

But with the oracle retrieving external information, its trustworthiness must come into question. Verifying the information provided by a third-party oracle without impacting the validation mechanism inherent to sharing blocks among the community is the oracle problem. As oracles are not distributed among the community, they represent a point of failure: they could be tampered with and provide false data to the blockchain.

The paper reviewed the contributions to academic research on blockchain oracles and found that Khalifa University is the largest contributor to this field, with 12 documents produced, of which two are among the ten most cited globally, and four are among the top 20.

The review noted that many of these papers involve contributions from multiple KU researchers, “[giving] an idea of an institution that is heavily investing in this sector.” The review also highlighted that Khalifa University has contributed at least one paper to every oracle application category, offering contributions to the healthcare and data management fields, and also producing research to address the oracle problem.

Ilhaam Omar, Research Associate, ranked sixth, MSc student Ammar Battah eleventh and Mohammad Moussa Madine, Graduate Researcher, ranked thirteenth.

Oracle applied research is focused on various sectors and Khalifa University research resonates in all areas of application.

Two of the three papers in the healthcare sector originate from KU and focus on the security and access control of patients’ records.

Contributions from KU approach the confidentiality of Internet of Things (IoT) data by granting users different access privileges, presenting a roadmap for development in the IoT sector.

For cloud computing, the work proposed by KU was the only paper to approach the problem of ensuring an optimal fees level to balance the needs of cloud providers and users.

Other KU studies investigated how data quality can be managed and improved with multi-party authorization and reputation systems.

The results from this review show that within six years of academic research, only 111 papers have been published. The UAE is one of the most productive countries, with all 12 publications coming from Khalifa University.

Despite the impressive number, it’s clear that blockchain oracles are still a globally neglected area of research. The paper also noted that there were no studies for real-world blockchain use cases such as in the entertainment, tourism, insurance or e-government resource management sectors. This represents a potential area of academic investigation that would be highly sought after.

Importantly, and contribute to the building of a knowledge economy in the UAE.

Jade Sterling
Science Writer
28 November 2021

The post Khalifa University Recognized as Most Published in Blockchain Oracle Research appeared first on Khalifa University.

Blockchain technology can offer significant opportunities to online auctions via enhanced transparency, data integrity and data traceability. 

Online auctions bring customers from around the world to a seller and mitigate geographical barriers that would previously have stood in the way of an enterprising salesman. However, these online auctions typically require a third-party to act as an intermediary between buyer and seller to facilitate and maintain the integrity of the transaction. As a result, online platforms rely on human interactions for data integrity, security, transparency and traceability with potential bidders having to trust an auction organizer with ensuring that bids are legitimate and transactions properly settled.

To overcome this, a team of researchers from Khalifa University’s Industrial and Systems Engineering Department has investigated using blockchain technology—a distributed, immutable ledger of transactions organized as blocks and maintained by a community of users—to run online auctions. Ilhaam Omar, Research Associate, Haya Hasan, Research Associate, Dr. Raja Jayaraman, Associate Professor, Dr. Khaled Salah, Professor, and Dr. Mohammed Omar, Professor and Director of the KU Research Center for Digital Supply Chain and Operations Management (DSOM), published their research in

“Our team is actively researching the most pressing challenges in supply chain and logistics,” said Dr. Jayaraman. “Our work on blockchain-based auctions was inspired by a real industry problem from a UAE-based company offering a heavy equipment rental service through a competitive bidding process. However, the existing auction process lacks trust and transparency with results that cannot be audited or verified In addition, the role of third-party intermediaries causes significant information delays and a results in a costly process. Our proposed solution has broad applications in ecommerce and related service industries.”

The research team realized that Blockchain-based auctions can effectively remove intermediaries, thereby reducing transaction costs and ensuring trust among stakeholders. Their solution uses programmable Ethereum smart contracts hosted on the blockchain. These “contracts” are actually simple programs that can be used to automatically exchange information under predetermined conditions.

Blockchain technology offers an immutable and tamper-proof ledger of transactions as a shared database, validated by a wide community. Each record created forms a block, and as each block is confirmed by the community, it is paired up with the previous entry in the chain, creating a chain of blocks. The platform is decentralized, trusted, and secure, with tamper-proof records, logs and transactions. The actions enabled by smart contracts take the digital place of a third party and inherit the immutable and distributed properties from the blockchain; tampering with them becomes almost impossible.

Additionally, the blockchain-based solution would allow the seller to directly connect with many potential bidders without intermediaries, while the bidders would be able to monitor the auction process.

The team’s solution was tested on one type of auction where the highest bid is known throughout the bidding process. However, their design allows the platform to be applied to other auctioning types simply by altering the structure of the smart contracts.

They now plan to develop decentralized applications to fully automate the auctioning process. They also plan to develop more multipurpose smart contracts to cater to the broader needs and requirements of auctioneers and bidders.

“Blockchain is an emerging, disruptive, and transformational technology with incredible growth potential and impact,” said Dr. Jayaraman. “Our work, which is at the heart of the UAE’s blockchain vision that is articulated through the Emirates Blockchain Strategy 2021, will help save time, effort and resources while improving competitiveness and providing transparency and trusted transactions.”

Jade Sterling
Science Writer
13 June 2021

The post Bringing Increased Security and Transparency to Online Auctions with Blockchain Technology appeared first on Khalifa University.

Designed to help people prove they have been vaccinated against Covid-19, digital immunity passports may help significantly control the virus’ spread while allowing normal life to re-emerge.

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How or when our lives may return to normal is still unclear as Covid-19 continues its spread. But a new strategy is being proposed that may significantly help control the virus’ spread while allowing normal life to re-emerge. The new strategy focuses on identifying and documenting people’s immunity, or their inability to infect others, with so-called ‘immunity passports.’ 

A digital immunity passport is a digital document detailing a person’s test results proving he or she is not considered a risk in spreading the virus. This accounts for people who have tested negative for the disease, have been vaccinated, or are otherwise immune to Covid-19. These passports will likely take the form of apps as outlined by a team of researchers at Khalifa University.

Haya R. Hasan, Research Associate, Dr. Khaled Salah, Professor, and Dr. Ibrar Yaqoob, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, from the KU Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, with Dr. Mohammed Omar, Professor, and Dr. Raja Jayaraman, Associate Professor, from the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, collaborated with Dr. Junaid Arshad, Associate Professor at Birmingham City University, and Dr. Samer Ellahham from the Heart and Vascular Institute, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, to develop a blockchain-based solution for Covid-19 digital medical passports and immunity certificates. Their work was published in

“Covid-19 has had an unprecedented impact on human life across the world,” said Dr. Salah. “Highly contagious, this disease has affected a significant proportion of the world population with a very large number of infections and deaths. Although the symptoms, which are similar to those of the influenza virus, vary in severity across people and not all people infected with the disease show symptoms. Some infected people are known as silent carriers or silent spreaders, which makes effective and verifiable testing paramount to a successful response to Covid-19.”

Immunity certification could prove valuable in settings where there is a high risk of transmission, such as large gatherings of people at sports events or during travel. The virus has wreaked particular havoc on the travel industry and so digital immunity passports may present a potential lifeline to that industry.

Designed to help people prove that they have been tested and that the test results belong to them, but without having to share any personal information, an immunity passport requires verifiable and trustworthy testing and concrete security.

“The government’s response strategy is evolved and implemented based on data related to infections collected by regional units,” explained Dr. Salah. “Such data relies on clinical diagnosis conducted by hospitals and other specialized facilities, but the presence of multiple intermediaries in this process causes delays in reporting time, which limits hospitals and testing centers from promptly reporting infections. Furthermore, the layered structure in reporting lines can lead to discrepancies, affecting the overall response strategy and its effectiveness in mitigating against the disease.”

The KU research team addressed the challenge of accurate and timely reporting of Covid-19 infections using blockchain technology to aid response strategies against the disease. Their solution uses programmable Ethereum smart contracts hosted on the blockchain to create a digital medical passport.

Blockchain technology offers an immutable and tamper-proof ledger of data and transactions as a shared database, validated by a wide community. Each record created forms a block, and as each block is confirmed by the community, it is paired up with the previous entry in the chain, creating a chain of blocks. Blockchain could be used to confirm a person’s immunity to Covid-19 in a way that is decentralized, trusted, and secure, with tamper-proof records, logs, and transactions.

“Digital health passports are a crucial mode of identification which can help mitigate the spread of contagious diseases,” explained Dr. Salah. “The smart contracts securely store the patient’s vaccination and immunization records as well as their medical and travel history, which is authenticated by the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Foreign Affairs for international usage. The patient’s personally identifiable information is completely secure, as disclosure is delegated to the owner of the information—the patient.”

Internationally, the biggest hurdle for the introduction of immunity passports is the scientific knowledge about Covid-19 itself. It is still unclear exactly how accurate antibody tests are, and when antibodies are detected, how long they remain in someone’s body. However, while the medical community continues to understand the nature of immune responses to Covid-19, researchers are building platforms and solutions on which to host digital immunity passports.

“For our purposes, we envisaged an immunity certificate to verify that a person has developed relevant antibodies to mitigate against Covid-19 and is consequently unable to infect other people,” explained Dr. Salah. “Whether this was from vaccination or previous infection is the medical aspect of this challenge and outside our scope. For us, people with these certificates can have them saved to their smart contract by a testing center or hospital and the time frame for immunity would also be included.”

In the team’s design, these smart contracts can generate events to notify patients and test-takers about medical updates with quarantine information or details on the medical tests they have completed. Health authorities are important stakeholders in this solution, representing legitimate testing and real results, and providing accurate information to the immutable blockchain.

As for privacy, every individual’s biometric information is associated with their unique Ethereum Address on the blockchain to maintain privacy. Users can control access to their sensitive information, including their identities and other credentials. The blockchain maintains authentication, trust and privacy, and allows users to share information as necessary when needed. At the same time, the solution offers security and transparency for international use.

“Our solution tackles an important problem where the travel history and medical history of a Covid-19 test taker or patient can be traced and tracked easily,” explained Dr. Salah. “Using the immutable logs, a patient can safely engage in social activities and institutions, while community managers and verified stakeholders can access immunization records in an efficient and trusted way.”

Jade Sterling
Science Writer
21 January 2021

The post KU Researchers Use Blockchain to Develop Digital Immunity Passports for COVID-19 appeared first on Khalifa University.

Mobile applications like Uber require a ‘crowdsourcing’ framework to pair people who need rides with available drivers, and collect a host of valuable data to evaluate users and update their reputations in the system, and to facilitate payment sharing among these users.
Crowdsensing is a type of crowdsourcing – a model that distributes work across a ‘crowd,’ or group of people, for a common goal – that involves using the crowd to collect and share sensing data i.e. temperature, using the rich sensing capabilities of the crowds’ mobile phones or smart devices.
“Crowdsourcing frameworks, such as Uber and Amazon Mechanical Turk (or MTurk, a crowdsourcing marketplace that allows independent workers to bid for small tasks), collect data from workers’ devices to fulfill tasks. The objective of the crowdsourcing framework is to facilitate completing tasks with the best possible quality while motivating users to frequently engage with the platform,” Maha Kadadha explained. Kadadha is a PhD student in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Khalifa University who is developing a , called SenseChain, to make crowdsensing apps like Uber resilient against ‘misbehaving’ users and platforms.
“Typically, a trusted centralized platform governs the crowdsensing activity and manages multiple requesters (that is, the people seeking rides in Uber or distributing jobs in MTurk), with multiple workers (which would be the Uber drivers and the people bidding for jobs in MTurk),” explained Kadadha. “The centralized platform holds users’ information, collects tasks, selects workers, evaluates their submissions, and shares their payments.”
However, there are important limitations to the security of these centralized platforms. Security can be compromised by passive or active misbehavior, with passive misbehavior involving an attempt from an external entity to collect unauthorized information without affecting the execution of the platform, and active misbehavior involving intentional attempts to harm other members in the framework.
Active misbehavior may manifest as workers compromising the quality of completed tasks by intentionally submitting incorrect data and biasing the evaluation, or committing to a task but never completing it. In MTurk, for example, a worker could submit multiple solutions to the same task using different identities to bias the correctness of his solution and increase his payments. Misbehaving requesters can also engage in malicious activities, but usually face far fewer penalization consequences enforced by the platform. These requesters can issue redundant tasks to occupy workers’ time and reduce availability for other requesters, and they could also cancel their tasks after a worker has completed it to avoid paying them.
The platform itself could also misbehave. Platforms can favor some workers over others, alter information to reduce reputations, and impact payments by altering submitted solutions and their evaluations. This is because the execution process of a centralized platform is hidden from users.
To overcome these misbehaving problems, Kadadha proposed using a decentralized crowdsensing framework. Distributed frameworks have been previously proposed for data analysis, task selection, and sensing group formation.
“While distributed frameworks, which share the framework across the crowd, have performed well, the trust issue remains unsolved as the frameworks are assumed to be trusted, which is not always the case.”
To provide reliability and trust, Kadadha and her team developed SenseChain, a blockchain-based decentralized crowdsensing framework to overcome the need for a trusted centralized platform by using Ethereum – an open source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform and operating system that uses smart contracts – as its underlying infrastructure. SenseChain brings together requesters and workers in a collaborative sensing platform that does not require pre-established trust between parties.
The framework runs the centralized functions in a decentralized manner, while the blockchain—a distributed immutable ledge of transactions organized as blocks and maintained by the users—allows for traceability, accountability, and date transparency. Privacy and user security are also maintained as users use their own generated public and private keys, from which their Ethereum addresses are derived.
SenseChain uses smart contracts to replace the centralized platform for registering users and maintaining their information reliably, collecting and publishing tasks, selecting workers in an unbiased manner, and transparently evaluating solutions and sharing proportional payments with workers.
“In SenseChain, users create their own accounts and Ethereum addresses without relying on a trusted third party to maintain them,” said Kadadha. “Then, their Ethereum addresses are used to interact with other members in the framework. The addresses, types and reputations are maintained and updated by one smart contract for reliability. Requesters create tasks by adding them to another smart contract which is then responsible for collecting reservations from workers, determining their Quality of Information (QoI) to accept their reservations, and evaluating solutions to calculate accepted workers’ payments. This evaluation is executed by miners, making it immune to manipulation from both the requesters and the platform. The consensus of miners ensures the trust in the outcome of the evaluation.
“Security is inherent in SenseChain from the underlying Ethereum blockchain and its deployed mechanisms. Centralized crowdsensing frameworks typically suffer from identity privacy issues, problems with trusted execution, and a lack of dual feedback. In SenseChain, the reputations of both the requesters and the workers are provided to implement a dual feedback mechanism so both have prior knowledge of each other’s reliability before committing to a task or accepting a worker. Additionally, the use of Ethereum addresses means users’ identities are protected and can be neither exploited nor exposed, and smart contracts handle the execution of each task’s evaluation, preventing any bias.”
To measure this framework’s feasibility, the team looked at the cost of deploying it, where cost is measured in two ways: the cost of each functionality, and the cost endured by each user.
“When comparing SenseChain to a centralized system, we noted that its performance is similar in terms of the quality of selected workers, distance travelled, task completion duration, and submitted solution quality,” said Kadadha. “In addition, the low deployment cost of the framework affirms the viability of blockchain-based crowdsensing frameworks.”
Jade Sterling
News and Features Writer
4 May 2020

The post Using Blockchain to Build Trust and Security in Crowdsourcing Apps like Uber appeared first on Khalifa University.

Dr. Ernesto Damiani Selected for Expert-Level Group on Blockchain

A Khalifa University member of faculty has been selected by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development to join a high-level expert group that will define Italy’s strategy for blockchain.

Dr. Ernesto Damiani, Director of the KU Center for Cyber-Physical Systems (C2PS) and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at KU, has been appointed as a committee member for his achievements in research and technology.

Italian Minister of Economic Development Luigi Di Maio made this statement regarding the committee members’ selection: “The numerous and qualified expressions of interest received in the selection of expert groups demonstrate the wealth of knowledge and experience that we have in Italy on emerging technologies. I thank all those who have expressed their availability and I am sure that together with the selected experts we will be able to build Strategies that are crucial for the development of our country in the name of innovation.”

The Italian government recently committed EUR100 million towards boosting blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) based innovation.

Regarding his selection, Dr. Damiani said: “”I am glad of this appointment, which will give me a unique opportunity to help defining Italy’s strategy for blockchain adoption. I will focus on my own specialty: using public ledgers based on blockchain to improve trustworthiness of data to be fed to AI models. My selection is also an endorsement of the high quality work on blockchain we are currently doing within the C2PS, where blockchain and AI are two major research themes. I am sure that synergy between work done here in the UAE and similar initiatives in Europe will further increase worldwide visibility and reputation of KU research.”

In September the ministry had launched a call for applications from experts to be part of the committee to draft Italy’s National Strategy on distributed ledger technologies and blockchain. The call came around the same time Italy joined the European Blockchain Partnership, a multi-million dollar effort to create an international blockchain.

The ministry stated that the selections were made based on the criteria that were reported in initial call, including competence, relevant experience, as well as the proven ability to effectively disclose the needs and requests of stakeholders or the reference body.

Zarina Khan
Senior Editor
6 January 2019

The post KU Faculty selected for Italian Blockchain Strategy Committee appeared first on Khalifa University.