Indian Institute of Technology Madras and Hedera Hashgraph, the most used, sustainable, enterprise-grade public network for the decentralized economy, announced the newest member of its Governing Council.

The globally-renowned technology university joins a rotating council of up to 39 global organizations that are from a diverse array of industries and geographies, and each runs an initial network node that enables the decentralized governance model for the Hedera public ledger.

As a newly appointed member of the Hedera Governing Council, IIT Madras will work closely with the Hedera ecosystem to advance its technical education, research, and innovation offerings in distributed ledger technology (DLT). IIT Madras will also use its term on the Hedera Council to ramp up its R&D efforts in the DLT space, testing use cases leveraging key services, such as the Hedera Consensus Service and the Hedera Token Service.

Speaking about this collaboration, Prof. Prabhu Rajagopal, Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Madras, who leads Remote Diagnostics at IIT Madras’ Center for Nondestructive Evaluation (CNDE), said, “We have identified enormous potential in Hedera Hashgraph, already the most used, and sustainable public ledgers on the market today, and we look forward to utilizing the Hedera Consensus and Token Services to study potentially ground-breaking new use cases. IIT Madras is recognized globally for pioneering work in areas such as renewable energy, telecommunications, non-destructive testing, biomedicine, healthcare and information and communication technologies (ICT), and its renowned tech alumni community.”

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Further, Prof. Prabhu Rajagopal said, “With this network, we aim to bring substantial value to the Hedera Governing Council, utilising our expertise in practical and innovative technological solutions to assist other council members and organizations in use case development. I am particularly enthused by the opportunity to test and scale our solutions in blockchain backed information systems in healthcare, industry and digital media.”

Prof. Rajagopal’s group is interested in the securitization of large scale digital data-sets arising from sensor logs, which was the initial catalyst for their interest in blockchain and distributed ledgers.

IIT Madras’ appointment to the Hedera Governing Council comes just weeks after the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), one of the UK’s top universities, announced its membership to the Hedera Governing Council, bolstering the council’s role within academia.

Established in 1956, IITs (at Madras and several other Indian cities) count Google CEO Sundar Pichai and former president of the SoftBank Group, Nikesh Arora, among its alumni. Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and founder of Khosla Ventures, noted to CBS that, “The IITs probably are the hardest school in the world to get into, to the best of my knowledge”.

Regarded as one of the top universities in the world, IIT has established research expertise in DLT, served as an incubator for India’s National Blockchain Project, and most recently, developed ‘BlockTrack‘, a first-of-its-kind blockchain-based secure medical data and information exchange mobile application for use by both medical providers and patients. BlockTrack aims to securely digitize healthcare information systems while protecting sensitive medical records by decentralizing the control and ownership of patient data, and is currently being field-tested at IIT Madras Institute Hospital.

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“The addition of IITM to the Hedera Governing Council is a significant and exciting development for the Hedera community and the wider DLT industry. Throughout the history of IIT, its alumni and academic staff have made substantial contributions to groundbreaking research in technology and innovation. This brings enormous value to the Hedera Council and will undoubtedly guide the development of critical use cases built on the Hedera network. Combined with the appointment of LSE, and the ongoing work being done by University College London (UCL), this marks another remarkable step forward for the relationship between academia and the decentralized economy,” said Mance Harmon, CEO and Co-founder of Hedera Hashgraph.