Please submit your contribution. It will be reviewed (by the organizers and scientific committee). It will be decided whether it can be presented as talk, lightning pitch or poster. The submission will be published on the webpage.
There will be space for posters in usual sizes. We will accept all minimally reasonable submissions (as in open science there shouldn´t be a pre-publication filter). Additionally, the abstract can be submitted to the Frontiers
Research Topic acting as a proceeding of the conference.
Format can be, but does not have to be:
Standard abstract, but also free form, we will accept any current format (Word, Text, PDF, html, ...). The length
of the abstract can vary in between 100-5000 words.
(We are intentionally flexible, so to reduce overhead work and let you focus on the content).
The copyright form should be CC-BY or similar licences, please assure that
you have the necessary rights to publish your content under a free license agreement. It would be appreciated if you could provide a link to the poster or talk later. Contributors are elegible to register as "regular" vistor, no
matter the affiliation.
Thank you very much and we are looking forward to your contribution.
DLT4RTD will offer a disruptive, blockchain-based crowdsourcing instrument to seminally improve quality, speed and credibility of complex, multi-disciplinary Research & Technology Development (RTD) initiatives. This Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) enables a game-changing business model leveraging so far untapped, best-in-class competences, skills and facilities of organisations and individuals to comprehensively democratise RTD for the benefit of economies and societies on a global scale. With its innovative, multi-tier secured scheme based on formalised reputation / staking / ranking and “competitive parallelisation” of tasks and their validation to independent entities providing oracle-triggering inputs, as well as smart legal contracts, simplified intellectual property arrangements and business-compatible financial transactions, DLT4RTD addresses the weak link at the sensitive interface of the blockchain with the real world.
For decades the universities in Asia have measured progress in research performance by benchmarking to the ISI article citation index as a ‘gold standard’. This practice became institutionalized when most government funding
agencies adopted citations as the primary indicator of impact for a scientist and their university. Not surprisingly, researchers, universities and funders focused myopically on publishing output as a proxy for impact.
With no trusted means to engage with colleagues and be recognized for their contributions, researchers had little incentive to share their findings and have lost time and opportunities to influence and advance the work
of others.
My last 3 years of experience in research outreach, by partnering with ARTiFACTS.ai across Asia have helped me see the challenges of changing research management behaviours, and observe the beginnings
of gradual transformation by a few universities starting to be more engaging by sharing their research outcomes in different forms. Unfortunately the awareness of blockchain technology and its application in scholarly
communication is still new within the university. Its adoption involves a broader group of stakeholders who must participate in evaluating the implications, establishing best practices, and selecting the right solutions.
In this session, I will outline these challenges in greater detail and will propose ways we can extend the decentralized science infrastructure to Asia by working together.
Announcement: In my talk, rather than presenting another revolutionary blockchain project for science, I will outline key obstacles and challenges of adopting DLT technologies to the needs and day-to-day business of researchers
and their institutions. The talk summarizes the experience of scientists, IT experts, entrepreneurs and university staff who either tried or considered using blokchain and similar technologies (smart contracts, cryptocurrencies,
DAO) in 2018-2019.The following issues have emerged:conflict of values (scientists detest acting as entrepreneurs, seeking profits and “selling” their research, “selling” one’s science on the market is awful); fear
of peers (the process of seeing one’s work judged by someone outside a closed circle is a traumatic experience that should be avoided at all costs)blockchain is a new form of control and coercion rather then an instrument
that gives more agency and freedom to scientistsdistrust of politics (DAO is inherently political, and public decision-making is allegedly prone to vote manipulation and mob rule).conservatism (who needs a new open
science journal on blockchain when there plenty of good journals?)unsatisfactory end user experience for blockchain technologies (“unless it’s a good as Telegram or GoogleDocuments, who would use it?”)Could these challenges
can be overcome? Has blockchain lost its hype appeal? Does it have much chances of winning over individual scholars and larger research communities, or is it destined to go under the hood and enter science only as a
service component in big corporations’ projects?
During the First Blockchain for Science Conference in 2018 the team of melda.io and ARTiFACTS met on the Hackersday,
sharing knowledge about both platforms and found a mutual starting point to enter the market of reproducible
research and trusted provenance.
ARTiFACTS is a distributed ledger and transaction engine that records a permanent, valid, and immutable chain of records for all scientific and academic research ‘transactions’ including
citing/attribution. melda.io is a cloud-based scalable data science and executable publishing platform with a strong computation engine running R and Python. By combining the two products, data scientists will have
access to much stronger set of tools when they are searching through publications, incorporating/citing others’ findings in their own research and protecting ownership and provenance of their work. This collaboration
will address key pain points experienced by data scientists, especially making research results easier to track and trace for future reference.
After our partnership announcement end of December 2018, both teams
developed an integration between the two products. Currently the teams are further optimizing the integration with the goal to bring it live beginning of 2020.
During the second Blockchain for Science Conference
on 4-5 November, ARTiFACTS and melda.io will demonstrate the added value created by this collaboration. We will provide a short live demo of the integration and point out how this integration benefits scientists who
are struggling with the practical aspects of reproducible research and trusted provenance of their research.
Both ARTiFACTS and Melda.io teams look forward to having an interactive session where researchers can
elaborate on their needs in the area of reproducible research and trusted provenance.
In healthcare, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can improve and prolong the lives of people around the world. However, building systems with AI often requires large amounts of data and computational resources. Healthcare
researchers rarely have either, so the research capabilities of AI in healthcare and its application in the real world remain below their potential. A blockchain-based infrastructure enables the sharing and trading of data,
computational resources, and even AI systems, thus accelerating AI adoption in healthcare. However, current blockchain systems have limited capabilities concerning data privacy and scalability. Innovative data processing technologies
can be applied to overcome these limitations. This presentation gives an overview of edge computation-based techniques, trusted hardware, and cryptographic techniques and assesses those technologies for their capabilities.
Furthermore, it introduces current research projects and paints a vision of the future ecosystem of healthcare research.
Proof of Existence as a blockchain service has first been published in 2013 as a public notary service on the Bitcoin network and can be used to verify the existence of a certain file in a specific point of time without sharing
the file or its content itself. This service is also available on the Ethereum based bloxberg network, a decentralized research infrastructure that is governed, operated and developed by an international consortium of research
facilities. Since it’s desirable to integrate the creation of this proof tightly into the research workflow, namely the acquisition and processing of research data, we show a MATLAB extension based solution with the concept
being applicable to other programming languages and environments.
As part of our effort to develop Leap variant of More Viable Plasma we present a system allowing on-chain actors to verify computation that was performed off-chain. More precisely, our scheme enables us to make judgements about
the correct execution of code run on Ethereum Virtual Machine. To do so we leverage SolEVMruntime authored by Andreas Oloffson that lets us trace and verify execution of Ethereum Virtual Machine bytecode using solidity programming
language. We develop upon similar scheme proposed by Truebit that verifies off-chain execution of Web Assembly. Intended use of the presented solution, in scope of our work, is to relegate major part of complex exit game needed
to verify correct execution of transactions affecting the exits of funds from Plasma chains to occur off-chain. Relegating computation off-chain not only makes it more cost-effective, but also frees it from numerous constraints
enforced by blockchain-based architecture. As proposed by team behind Truebit, such a scheme can be developed further into fully-fledged Computation Market, where off-chain agents are incentivized to complete useful computations
and earn rewards for truthfully publishing the results on-chain. To better illustrate the idea, we have created the “Prime Casino” proof-of-concept computation market that was deployed on Görli Ethereum test network. We hope
that developing upon this concept we can present a new deal on data, by allowing distributed applications to incorporate and verify results of complex computation that cannot be feasibly performed on-chain. All work on SolEVM
Enforcer is open-sourced and we welcome any and all interested parties to collaborate with us to develop our scheme and software further.