In the first part of this video, a brief introduction of blockchains is presented (the second part "Differential Privacy" was delivered by another presenter). In this, the tamper-evident and tamper-resistant properties of blockchains are explained in brief. The properties are explained by taking an example of financial transactions. Although the blockchains are popularly known because of their use case in financial transactions (cryptocurrencies), some other use cases of blockchains are discussed at the end of the part of the video.

One of the important unsolved problems in information theory is the conjecture that network coding has no rate benefit over routing in undirected unicast networks. If the conjecture is true, then the undirected unicast network information capacity is the same as the routing capacity. In this talk, we present an upper bound, called the partition bound, on the symmetric rate for information flow in general undirected unicast networks. We show explicit routing solutions achieving the partition bound for a class of complete n-partite networks called Type-I n-partite networks. Recently, the conjecture was proved for a new class of networks, and it was shown that all the network instances for which the conjecture is proved previously are elements of this class. We show the existence of a network outside of the class of networks with unverified conjecture such that the partition bound is tight and attainable by routing.