Trent McConaghy is an AI researcher and blockchain engineer. He is the founder & CTO of BigchainDB, IPDB, ascribe, and Solido. He started his career by doing AI research for national defense in the 1990s, while still an undergraduate, and went on to obtain a PhD from KU Leuven and receive an award for the #1 thesis worldwide in the field. He has done Machine Learning research for the Canadian Department of National Defense, and has written two books and 35 papers, and holds 20 patents on Machine Learning, circuits and creativity.