Presenters
Jamie Joyce, Society Library
Jamie is the founder and Executive Director of the Society Library – a non-profit that creates structured knowledge databases of media concerning debates and discussions around complex social issues. Her goal is to improve humanity’s relationship with information online: in educational, epistemological, and political contexts…
Darren Zhu, Atoms.org
Darren studied biology at Yale before joining the first class of Thiel Fellows in 2011 to work on synthetic biology startups. He’s currently building Atoms.org, a web3 research platform with support from the Ethereum Foundation and Protocol Labs….
Philipp Koepellinger, Desci Labs
Phillip is a professor in social science genetics at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin Madison and also holds an appointment at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam at the Department of Economics…
Niklas Rindtorff, LabDAO
Niklas Rindtorff is a physician-scientist at the German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg. Here he combines high-throughput drug testing, image analysis and patient-derived organoids to develop causal models of drug response and resistance…
Eugene Leventhal, Smart Contract Research Forum
Eugene Leventhal graduated from Heinz College in May 2019 with a Master’s in Public Policy & Management student at Heinz College. While a student, he was the leader of Heinz Radio, the co-president of the CMU Blockchain Group and he worked part-time with the CyLab Institute of Security & Privacy building relationships and community around blockchain…
DeSci: Progress, Challenges, Integration with Legacy Institutions
Society Library (Jamie Joyce) Takeaways:
- Working on epistemic mapping, mapping deliberations about complex subjects (Nuclear energy, climate change, Covid-19), decision-making models
- Ramping up integration with city councils to improve decision making
- Creating visualizations for compressing complex knowledge, open to seeing what others could do with visualizations of Society Library’s data as well
- Building methods for deconstructing arguments and mapping them out, mining claims and arguments
- These processes have applications for Decentralized Science and general public social and political spaces
Atoms.org (Darren Zhu) Takeaways:
- Paper publishing and grant funding are slow and have a lot of friction
- Science quality is declining, partially evidenced by the replication crisis
- More edge science should be funded, high risk high reward science that falls between the cracks of bureaucracy
- These problems can be solved with new tools and organizations centered on decentralized science
- Currently in the middle of building and could use another round of funding and more full stack developers
- Conference peer reviews may be a bigger problem than normal peer review because there is no iteration
Desci Labs (Philipp Koepellinger) Takeaways:
- Desci labs is focused on improving replicatability, accessibility, and incentives for scientists
- Nodeviewer tool under construction to allow scientists to build rich research objects that can be stored on peer to peer networks. Manuscript, data, code, annotations – basically a living document with enriched media to allow deeper explanations of experiments
- Crypto integration could be used to incentivize replication and crowdfunding
- Peer review isn’t getting paid right now, it’s a donation to the publication industry which unfairly monetizes their work
- Building a professionally managed discord server soon
- Two uses for web3 are to fund fringe research and to create more accessibility for established research
LabDAO (Niklas Rindtorff) Takeaways:
- It may be possible to spin up mini-CRO entities in any lab and receive open source payments
- LabDAO is an organization that attempts to make this idea a reality
- Open lab protocol is being developed to allow labs to interact with each other in an automated fashion
- Currently mostly computational work but aspirations for wetlab work in the future
- Github is a good structural model for a decentralized system of cooperation
Smart Contract Research Forum (Eugene Leventhal) Takeaways:
- Grant funded org focused on advancing web3 research
- Open peer review project currently being defined and researched
- The project is open to any interested organizations that would like to help develop open peer review
- There’s a coordinated emerging effort to organize the desci community
- What will happen after a year of active community building?
- Anonymity in peer review needs to be looked at more closely
- Culture may be the hardest thing to change regarding science processes