Investing in the Future: Partnership between Radium Core and the University of Texas at Arlington, TX.
An Interview with Sajib Datta, Ph.D.
by Linda Prior for Radium Core
In its Mission Statement, the University of Texas at Arlington describes itself as a comprehensive research, teaching, and public service institution whose mission is the advancement of knowledge and the pursuit of excellence. Embedded in the President’s Message and the university’s vision and values as outlined on the website are the recurrent themes of ground-breaking innovation, inclusivity and social impact; in other words, the emphasis is on not only fostering great knowledge for its own sake but wanting that knowledge to be translated into things that will benefit society as a whole.
Radium is fortunate therefore to have been approached in January 2019 by Dr. Sajib Datta, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at UTA, with an idea for a mutually beneficial scholarship project. Dr. Datta agreed to an interview with me in which we talked about the partnership between UTA and Radium and his own vision for advancing blockchain technology in society.
LP: Dr. Datta, you have already struck up a partnership with Komodo and I read their piece about this collaboration, in which you were quoted as saying that as a crypto investor yourself, you observed through your research that some large financial organisations were beginning to invest in blockchain technology and even develop their own blockchain infrastructures. Was it this that spurred you into reaching out to some crypto projects, and if so, what is the ultimate objective for you?
SD: That’s a good question. I started investing in crypto about a year and a half ago, got fascinated by blockchain technology and decided I wanted to teach this in class — the best way to learn is to teach, they say, to crystallize your own understanding. I proposed the idea to the university, it got approved, and then I wondered what more I could do to improve the students’ experience. The idea of a partnership with an existing blockchain cryptocurrency company came to me, and this is what motivated me to reach out to Komodo initially as I had already invested in them.
LP: What was it that attracted you to work with Radium, then, and what were the features that made Radium stand out for you from the huge number of other coins in the space?
SD: I am very interested in the security, privacy and identity management features of Radium. After reading Radium’s White Paper I thought it had great potential as an identity management and verification system. The blockchain environment needs an entity like this; identity management is very much needed in a decentralized environment.
There are two other things I like about Radium: first, that they didn’t do an ICO; and second, that the circulation is smaller, which I felt was a positive factor. In the economic domain, it’s all about supply and demand, so I saw that Radium has a very limited supply, unlike some coins which have billions in circulation, so kind of diluted; whereas I felt that with Radium, the founders are not too concerned about ICO and coin circulation, they just want to create a really good project.
I initially reached out to Justin in January this year. He included John in his reply, and within a week we were talking about working together.
LP: What do you see as the key differences between Radium and Komodo?
SD: If you want to compare the two, Komodo is a much bigger project as far as the market cap is concerned; they have a really big team and at one point they had unicorn status [a privately held start-up with a valuation of over $1 billion]. Their objectives are quite different from Radium’s. Komodo is rather like Ethereum as in they are providing a generic blockchain as an infrastructure service, and you can deploy any sort of dapps on the Komodo blockchain. Not specifically working with one sector — their mission is fairly broad. Komodo is also pursuing a decentralized exchange and I found their atomic swap very innovative.
I really like the fact that Radium is a relatively smaller and more niche project. Komodo is a totally decentralized organization and has offices in Singapore and the UK, with founder members in a number of different countries and time zones. Like Komodo, Radium is also a totally decentralized organization, which is powered and supported by the global community.
LP: From my background research I understand that Dr. Hong Jiang, Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UTA, was in fact extremely happy for you to forge ahead with this line of study. Was he surprised when you first approached him with the idea of teaching the blockchain course?
SD: Dr. Jiang is a really good person, a very experienced professor, and was extremely supportive of the idea to teach blockchain technology. In fact, we have plans to develop a short programme of study on blockchain technology for professionals or others who have a specific interest in the topic, which will give them a standalone certificate in the discipline. Dr. Jiang also has close involvement with various funding agencies, particularly the National Science Foundation; he knows where the technology is going, so he was very supportive of my proposal to partner with a crypto currency company to expand the students’ experience.
LP: For the benefit of the community, can you explain a bit more about the project?
SD: Some of my students at UTA are going to be working on various projects with the Radium development team — in fact one of my students has been working for the past two months already and found some technical issues that we can help with, to do with the Radium blockchain and the wallet software, in which we identified two or three areas of improvement regarding technical features. That student will receive a scholarship provided by Radium and I am really thankful to Radium for their support. I do also have another prospective student who is being assessed with a view to scholarship.
Going forward, I anticipate that projects will include more work on wallet security and user experience features.
As part of the partnership, I also look forward to working with the Radium management team on issues like branding and growth strategies. Perhaps also meet-ups, blockchain conferences and so on, such as Synapse which the team attended last year.
LP: How are students being selected for the scholarship?
SD: Well, first I ask my students if they are interested in blockchain-related projects. They contact me if they want to know more and I will then assign them some work as a test. For example, the student who is currently already on board stopped by my office one day, we had a really nice chat, and I asked him to read through the Radium White Paper. I highlighted where I could see potential areas for improvement, and asked him to suggest ways in which he would improve it. Within a couple of weeks, he returned with some good ideas, we worked on it together, and the revised version is now live on the website.
A week or so later, we decided to download the wallet software to see if there were any performance issues there, and afterwards he was asked to provide a report on the performance of the software.
I want to ensure that the scholarships are awarded very fairly and to the right candidates, so I set tasks and assess their performance and also their commitment, to make sure that a student is right for the project. I take a step by step approach because I am looking for students that are reliable, have true passion, are technically skilled, and are totally committed.
As students are assigned, they will receive regular supervision and mentoring from me throughout the term of the scholarship.
LP: Radium have listed a number of use cases for Radium. Are there any applications in particular you see your students working on as the partnership programme evolves? What are your hopes for their involvement in the project?
SD: As we move forward, we are going to do more investigation on the Radium blockchain, and some of the things I have spoken to the students about is decentralized file verification; that file could be anything, like for example someone’s degree certificate, or perhaps a piece of music or a film you want to download, well that could be verified as coming from an approved source and not pirated. The Radium platform could also be used to validate an original piece of work and those sorts of applications could be very useful. I think we can certainly work on this as a proof of concept.
LP: What do you see as the future for crypto? Do you foresee it completely replacing fiat in the future?
SD: I think the rise of digital currency is inevitable, mainly because the potential for artificial intelligence is massive and I think that AI is going to eventually take over the world. My belief is that we will see a paradigm shift in the next 15–20 years and that AI-driven society is going to need crypto or digital currency, because traditional paper-based currencies will be outdated. Your microwave will be able to talk to your fridge for example, and are you going to used fiat for that? No, you will need a digital currency, which will be much more cost-effective, and without it the AI revolution will be incomplete. Things are moving so fast that in as little as 30 years we could have a quantum AI machine, a room-sized box, that will have enough computational power, or enough consciousness, to outperform humanity.
LP: Well if that’s going to happen, I hope it will be at a rate that humanity can psychologically cope with it!
SD: Indeed, and there’s another whole philosophical debate.
LP: So bringing us back to the here and now, what do you see as the future for Radium and how it should develop?
SD: I think that it will depend on the deploying of various applications, because it will initially find its niche, for example file verification, and then the next stage would be partnering with a particular industry and this will bring about a bright future for Radium. At the same time as we build up the community, my students will be helping to work on the security of Radium which will continue to add value to the coin.
LP: Sajib, it’s been a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you for your time.
Sajib Datta has been at Arlington since 2009, and has been teaching since 2014 when he completed his PhD in Computer Science. Before delving into the details of the Radium project, I asked Sajib a little about himself and his own personal aims and ambitions. That he is a passionate advocate of meditation comes through loud and clear. He has been practicing meditation for some three years now and finds that even just three to five minutes every morning helps him teach better, perform better, and be more focused and resilient. He also encourages his students to meditate by incorporating a minute or so of meditation time at the start of each lesson, to help the class settle their collective mind and focus on the lecture to come.
Added to that Sajib is a keen runner and describes the combination of calm and elation derived from running as ‘meditation in movement’. We talked for some time about meditation and the benefits it can bring, from simply lowering the blood pressure to an increased sense of self-confidence as you become liberated from worrying about other people’s opinions, less controlled by your emotions, and so on.
When asked about his ambitions for the future, Sajib replied that he loves teaching and anticipates doing this for many years to come, explaining that it’s very much a two-way process and he ‘teaches to learn’. I think it’s fair to say that Sajib is not your average teacher, and judging from the number of positive reviews he has received on ‘Rate My Professors’, his students agree.
