IOTA, the non-profit organisation driving the development of an open, feeless, and highly scalable distributed ledger technology (DLT) for Web3 applications and digital economies, has announced the launch of a state-of-the-art facility, Imperial IOTA Infrastructures Lab at Imperial College London (I3-Lab).
The I3-Lab is backed by an endowment of 1 million GBP from the IOTA Foundation with additional funding from Imperial College London. It will be a beacon for so-called translational research, which is an inquiry moving basic scientific discoveries more quickly and efficiently into practice. The I³-Lab puts DLT at the heart of the circular economy as well as includes an incubator for sustainable business models and digital tools based on servitisation.
These models will decouple economic growth from resource consumption and promote shared access to goods, services, and materials, helping societies shift away from conventional sole-ownership models.
- The I3-Lab has also secured grants for projects including:
- Autofair, a Horizon Europe project to combat bias-free AI algorithms
- iCircular3, which aims to improve circularity in industrial robots, electric vehicles, and outdoor power products
- CoDiet, which will address diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and obesity through diet-monitoring tech and personalised nutrition
- Initiatives advancing battery passport tech in response to the upcoming EU Battery Regulation, predictive analytic tools to detect off-shoring of pollution, and more
The 25-member Lab will consist of five PhD students and several senior researchers. The IOTA Foundation’s Applied Research Team, led by Dr. William Sanders, IOTA’s Director of Applied Research, will be working and exchanging knowledge with them. The I3-Lab marks the latest development in the relationship between IOTA and Imperial. IOTA has previously gifted a 1 million GBP grant to the founding of the I3-Lab for circular economy research within Imperial’s Dyson School of Design Engineering. The Foundation also endowed 155,000 GBP toward designing a congestion control algorithm, a new design paradigm for DLTs.
IOTA’s DLT is already being used in projects that are innovating new economic models, such as the Trade Logistics Information Pipeline and Digital Product Passports.
“The I3-Lab marks a major stride in addressing the global climate crisis,” says Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder and Chairman of the IOTA Foundation. “Only when we see the value in bringing together experts in fields such as science, technology, philanthropy, DLT, and regulation will we be able to help businesses and consumers realise the potential of circular economy models and change behaviour across the board.”
