The United States government is funding a distributed ledger technology project (DLT), dubbed Open Science Chain (OSC) and it’s being conducted by researchers at the University of California. According to a statement by the National Science Foundation (NSF) on its official website on August 21, 2018, the OSC is aimed at enhancing scientific research.
Subhashini Wins
Per the NSF, the DLT-based solution called Open Science Chain (OSC) being created by Subhashini Sivagnanam at the University of California, San Diego, would enable researchers to quickly get access to data collected during scientific experiments and aid the entire research process.
The leader of the project, Subhashini Sivagnanam, is an experienced researcher and software architect at the division of Data Enabled Scientific Computing at the San Diego Supercomputing Center.
Researching can be quite cumbersome, overly complicated and erroneous if the data needed for the project is not easily accessible in a timely manner. The OSC project is focused on creating a blockchain-powered web-based platform that will enable researchers to provide the necessary metadata as well as verification information about their scientific datasets and this information will be updated continuously and “evolve in an auditable manner.”
Sivagnanam has won the sum of $818,433 for the OSC project. The grant will take effect on September 1, 2018, and would remain active until August 31, 2021.
The NSF Legacy
Established since 1958, the United States National Science Foundation currently has about 1700 people in its employ. Directed by France A. Cordova, the agency’s primary objective is to support fundamental research and education in the non-medical fields of science and engineering. The NSF has funded several blockchain-based projects in the past, and it has a budget of more than $7 billion for 2018.
According to public records in July 2015, the NSF awarded a continuing grant of $319,705 which runs until June 2019, to researchers looking to study the impact of digital assets like bitcoin on the social and economic ecosystem and find answers to several other questions concerning cryptocurrencies and the law.
In April 2018, researchers at the North Carolina State University applied for an NSF grant to create a DLT-based open-source network that would allow firms to locate credible small-and-medium-sized manufacturers that can build specific components needed by the companies.
In related news, BTCManager informed in January 2018 that NASA had awarded the sum of $333,000 to the University of Akron (UA) Assistant Professor Jin Wei Kocsis, to enable him to develop A.I. and blockchain-based systems that would enable satellites to travel farther into space and make more independent and right decisions
