05/22/2026
Dale Fickett: A huge "Thank you" to Swati Sachan, with whom I've been honored to co-author our conference paper...
We were accepted for the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Grenada, Spain.
Our paper:
"Post-Quantum DeFi for Inclusive Banking by Federated Intelligence"
IEEE conferences are much more than academic gatherings; they function as the "global engine room" for technological advancement. With over 1,200 conferences held annually across roughly 80 countries, they represent the primary venue where cutting-edge research transitions into industry standards and consumer technology:
1.The Global Gold Standard for Research
2. Catalyst for Global Industry Standards
3. Economic and Geopolitical Influence
4. Professional "Social Capital"
Over 500,000 annual attendees globally,
reach ing members in 160+ countries; and 45% of members are outside the US.
Here's why our paper matters beyond this critical academic milestone:
The U.S. has roughly 33 million small businesses. A disproportionate number of them — particularly those led by women, minorities, rural entrepreneurs, and first-generation owners — are denied capital not because they're bad risks, but because existing AI lending systems were never trained to evaluate them accurately.
This research introduces a new approach:
> Multiple banks can collaborate on a lending decision without ever exposing their private data to each other — enabled by encryption designed to withstand even quantum computing attacks.
> The judgment of experienced human underwriters is encoded mathematically and woven into the AI's decision-making — so borrowers with thin credit files get evaluated by collective expertise, not just historical data.
> Every decision is fully auditable and compliant with U.S. and EU data protection law — no black boxes, no regulatory exposure.
We proved the concept on agricultural lending in rural Virginia, in partnership with four regional banks. The technology works. Now the question is deployment.
This is the infrastructure layer beneath Open Trellis — and it's one piece of a larger mission: ensuring that access to capital is determined by the merit of an idea and the character of an entrepreneur, not by the legacy gaps in a dataset.
