Mariam Al Muhairi is the Head of the UAE’s Centre for the 4th Industrial Revolution and  Project Manager at the Dubai Future Foundation. She joins us to discuss the UAE’s blockchain deployment case studies and learnings. She also shares some fascinating results of a survey conducted with over 100 stakeholders from more than 60 various governmental and non-governmental entities across the UAE regarding top blockchain implementation challenges and success factors.

 

What is blockchain?

Mariam likes to see things in the form of physical blocks. For her blockchain are blocks, identifiable by a unique code, that stores information, and stores who is transacting with the information. Each transaction is verified through a process that involves miners on a public blockchain which creates great security. This ultimately also helps to avoid blocks being tampered and used in a fraudulent manner.

 

Dubai Future Foundation

The UAE’s Centre for the 4th Industrial Revolution is an initiative under the Dubai Future Foundation. The Future Foundation was established in 2016 with a main mandate across five departments to look into the future of Dubai and identify trends that will benefit both the economy but also the society and other areas within the Emirates. The five departments include:

* Foresight and imagination – development of trends

* Content dissemination – the aim is to fill the gap in the dissemination of scientific and technological content in Arabic to the UAE and MENA region

* Capacity building – an academy where people can take courses but also a platform where experts present to the public

* A platform to facilitate the partnering up of startups with government entities

* Museum of the future is due to open next year as both a touristic attraction but also as a policymaking tool to see how people react to different ideas or different scenarios of the future

 

UAE’s Centre for the 4th Industrial Revolution, which Mariam leads is a collaboration between the World Economic Forum and the Dubai Future Foundation. The Centre focuses on policy development for emerging technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence and precision medicine.

 

Dubai Blockchain Strategy & The Emirates Blockchain Strategy

The Dubai Blockchain Strategy, launched in October 2016 by His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of the Executive Council, was the result of a collaboration between the Smart Dubai Office  and the Dubai Future Foundation to continuously explore and evaluate the latest technology innovations that demonstrate an opportunity to deliver more seamless, safe, efficient and impactful city experiences. Additionally, it was about creating an industry and a market around this emerging technology as well as figure out how it could be used.

The strategy establishes a roadmap for the introduction of blockchain technology for Dubai and the creation of an open platform to share the technology with cities across the globe. The Dubai Blockchain Strategy is built on three pillars of government efficiency, industry creation and international leadership.

* Government efficiency: under this pillar, the strategy will contribute to increased government efficiency by implementing blockchain and ena...