Humans of Blockchain is our initiative to highlight the human side of the industry and showcase blockchain professionals around the world. The goal is to get to know the people pushing blockchain forward better and understand them at a personal level. Our previous post in the series was on Dimitris Neocleous and can be read here.

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If there is a person that pops into mind when talking about VeChainThor’s technicalities, that is Dr. Peter Zhou.

With a PhD in Computer Vision and Gait Recognition from the University of Southampton, Peter has 10 years of experience in computer science research and development. As VeChain’s Chief Scientist and member of the Foundation steering committee, amongst other things, he is responsible for VeChain’s R&D efforts, university partnerships and IP protection.

Passionate about technology, he often shares his thoughts and knowledge on Medium, hosted a PoA2.0 – SURFACE webinar with Dr. Zhijie (Max) Ren and will be holding a third webinar on “Blockchain Governance” this coming Wednesday 22nd July 2020.

News and announcements usually cover VeChain’s business development achievements and we rarely hear about the people improving VeChain’s infrastructure and driving blockchain innovation behind the scenes. In this episode, Peter shares with us what it means to work with VeChain’s core developer team and why he is excited about blockchain technology.

Tell us about yourself and how you got into blockchain

I was first aware of Bitcoin in late 2016. Because of my curiosity of new technology, from time to time, I started to do my own research on bitcoin and later on shifted my attention to the more general subject of blockchain. 

It was until I met Sunny and Jay and had some inspiring conversations with them that I realized blockchain’s true potential to change our lives. When given the chance to join VeChain, it didn’t take me long to decide to join the team to start a new chapter in my life. 

Another important reason I got into blockchain is due to my long-time wish to be involved in developing technology that can be truly mass adopted and have significant business and social impacts. Blockchain is definitely going to help me achieve my goal.

You were previously a research scientist at the University of Oulu and University of Kent. Can you tell us more about it?

After I finished my PhD, I moved to the University Kent to join the European project called “3D Face” in 2007. It was a pioneering project that tried to use 3D facial information to enhance face recognition performance 10 years ago, despite the fact that 3D info has been regularly used for face recognition nowadays. 

After the project, I joined the machine vision research group at the University of Oulu, Finland. My research was part of the project “Affective human-robot interaction” and was focused on a specific research topic called visual speech recognition. Simply speaking, it is about recognizing what we speak by looking at the motion of our lips and tongues.

How did you find the transition into the business world? Were there any particular challenges?

Overall, the transition is challenging and still ongoing. Personally, I quite enjoy the process because it constantly pushes me to learn, innovate, reflect, and be a better person.

In academia, my sole aim, as a research scientist, is to advance the existing knowledge and technology in a certain research area. However, it is no longer the case. The biggest challenge for me has been to figure out how to fit in the role of the chief scientist with the goal of maximizing business and ecosystem values for VeChain. 

Compared with other CXO jobs, the chief scientist is a role that is less defined and more versatile. I’ve been doing things such as identifying and conducting crucial research work with a limited budget, communicating with/educating the community and general public, bridging our business and technical/research team at both directions, strategic thinking/planning, etc.

What are you most proud of about VeChain and why?

I am most proud of the determination of the VeChain team for our goal of mass adoption of blockchain technology.

We all know that things are changing extremely fast in the blockchain world. I’ve seen teams starting with a very ambitious goal, but distracted and eventually lost during the market pumps and dumps later on. 

We have been through the same kind of craziness, however, we have never forgotten the goal set at the very beginning. Of course, there have been many setbacks, but the team has been determined and kept going forward.

What has been the biggest challenge your team has had to face and how did you overcome it?

The biggest challenge is to convert research outcomes into real products. The difficulty is often caused by the knowledge gap between researchers and software developers.

On one hand, researchers are good at prototyping systems, but lack experience of real product development. On the other hand, it’s difficult for software developers to fully understand the theoretical significance and delicacy of certain solutions researchers come up with.

The way to overcome it is to have someone on the research side (very often it’s me) to go deeply into the technical details of the existing software system and then to bridge two sides through many constructive communications and discussions before and during the actual development.

What is VeChainThor’s current technical priority and how is the foundation approaching it?

The current technical priority is to make VeChainThor more secure and scalable, capable of supporting future growth of the VeChain ecosystem.

The team is currently working on upgrading the consensus from PoA1.0 to PoA2.0 that is theoretically more secure and scalable. We are also investigating solutions to the interoperability between blockchains using PoA2.0 to further increase throughput and expand the use-case scenarios.

Peter Zhou at a Google campus

The general public is becoming more aware of the benefits of blockchain. When do you think the technology will become mainstream and why?

I think that blockchain technology will become mainstream in the next five years. 

With the general public understanding more about the benefits and importance of blockchain tech, they are going to more likely accept and purchase products that use the technology. It will certainly push more and more enterprises to adopt blockchain tech. Being mainstream does not mean that most of us would start to use digital wallets and use dapps all day long. It means that our daily activities would somehow depend on blockchain although we might not directly feel or see the existence of blockchain. Products such as the VeChan ToolChain will certainly act as a catalyst to speed up the adoption.

Where do you see VeChainThor in 5 years? What is your long term vision and how is the team planning to achieve this?

I can see in the next five years VeChainThor emerging as one of the major public value-chains associated with real-world business activities worth billions of dollars. My long-term vision is that VeChainThor is to become a global infrastructure-level decentralized data engine to facilitate business activities everywhere. 

Our blockchain will be constantly absorbing fine-grained business data labelled with confidence levels issued by assurance companies such as DNV-GL. These data will not only support the daily business that relies on the immutability and quality of the data, but also enables a highly efficient data market that incorporates AI and big data technologies. 

The team is currently building the foundation for the future. For instance, we are upgrading the mainnet consensus for better security and scalability; we are building ToolChain for engaging more businesses; and we are working with DNV-GL to start data verification (labelling).

What other blockchain projects excite you?

VeChain is always the best to me in terms of mass adoption of blockchain technology. From a purely technical perspective, I am also excited about Ethereum and Libra.

How would you describe yourself in 3 words?

Curious, adaptive and determined

What would be your superpower?

Teleportation

What is your guilty pleasure?

Playing with my daughter’s legos to build stuff

What are your hobbies?

Playing violin (learning together with my two daughters), reading and soccer

If you could go back to any moment in history where would you go?

I’d like to go back to witness the very beginning/birth of the mighty Bitcoin.

Who is your biggest inspiration and why?

My grandma. I lived with her for a couple of years at my very young age and we had been very close since then until she passed away. 

Grandma was an ordinary woman. She didn’t have a chance to attend schools, lived on a tiny pension, and didn’t have any impressive skill. However, her love for the family, optimism about the future and determination to overcome difficulties had constantly inspired me and shaped my personality somehow.

A fun fact about you?

I persuaded my daughter (by ice creams) to be my weight disc when the local gym was closed due to the pandemic.

What is the most adventurous thing you’ve ever done?

At age 6, I left my home alone without telling my parents, walked about half an hour from home to a bus stop and took the bus to my grandparents’ home which was a dozen stops away.

What was your first computer?

The Intel 486

Thanks to Peter Zhou for taking part in this article. We hope you enjoyed it.

If you would like us to profile someone in particular who is helping drive blockchain forward, let us know on Twitter and we’ll do our best to make it happen.

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