Increasing globalization, eCommerce usage and social awareness is leading to consumers demanding variety, value, convenience, immediacy, verifiable authenticity and provenance, ethical materials sourcing & manufacturing, regulatory compliance, and services after sales. Demand fulfillment in this environment requires supply chains with numerous flow paths in production, merchandising, and fulfillment involving many organizational and institutional handoff. Managing such complexities requires a transition, from the traditional paradigm of planning followed by long-loop execution for a handful of segments, to a paradigm of managing a portfolio of end-to-end instrumented, data-rich, micro-segmented supply chains that are, monitored and adjusted in near real-time. At the core, this calls for a new look at how data is created, shared, analyzed, and used across the supply chain, areas for which Blockchain technology is well suited. In this talk, I will describe blockchain technology and discuss how blockchains are fundamentally changing the landscape of transactions. I will highlight ongoing work in applying this technology in food safety and provenance, ocean freight logistics, maintenance and repair operations, asset management and tracking, and financial settlements. SPEAKER BIO: Chandra Narayanaswami, PhD Principal Research Staff Member BM TJ Watson Research Center, New York Chandra is currently a Principal Research Staff Member working on Blockchain and Supply Chain at IBM Research. From 2008-2016 he was actively involved in core science and technology for several areas of AI-based electronic commerce including real-time personalized customer engagement solutions, local events-based marketing kit, alternative and dynamic points of commerce, next generation supply chains, omnichannel inventory and order fulfillment optimization, and retail/mobile payments. Earlier he pioneered several works in several areas that impact our society today - the Linux Watch, SoulPad, and Personal Mobile Hub that included medical monitoring applications, Inverted Browsers (essentially, the hybrid mobile app model where the browser is included in the app), a navigation system that was the first to provide photographs along with route information, and OpenGL graphics standards. Chandra has authored more than 40 scientific papers, and served as Guest Editor, Associate Editor in Chief of IEEE publications and as General Chair and Program Committee Member of numerous ACM/IEEE conferences. He holds more than 100 US Patents and was twice named an IBM Master Inventor. He has a PhD in Computer and Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a BTech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He's a Fellow of the IEEE and a Member of the IBM Academy of Technology and the IBM Industry Academy.