Speakers
We are extremely happy to have the following confirmed speakers for our summer school. The list is updated as planning progresses.
Michel Bauwens
Keynote Speaker
Our keynote presentation will be given by Michel Bauwens, a Belgian researcher and writer known for his work on peer-to-peer (P2P) theory, digital commons, and open/cooperative models of production and governance. He is the founder of the P2P Foundation, which documents and promotes commons-based peer production and related social innovations. Bauwens has advised and collaborated with civic and policy initiatives internationally (including work in Ecuador) and is the author of books such as "Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy" and "Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto".
Carmela Troncoso
Carmela Troncoso heads the SPRING Lab. Her work focuses on building and deploying secure and privacy-preserving systems that minimize societal harms; and on critically analyzing technologies with respect to the protection they provide to social values. She received her PhD from KU Leuven in 2011. Her work on privacy has received multiple awards, including the CNIL-INRIA Privacy Protection Award in 2017 and she has been named 40 under 40 in technology by Fortune in 2020.
During the summer school, Carmela will talk about the tradeoffs between decentralization and privacy, and her recent impossibility results on decentralized learning.
Felix Fritsch & Joel Dietz
Felix Fritsch is a political scientist and co-founder of the Commons Hub. He received his PhD from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Italy. His research focuses on the ideological dimension of decentralized governance and tokenization enabled through blockchain technology. In particular, he seeks to extrapolate the potential future impact of this technology from prevalent dynamics in the structure and ideology of the blockchain ecosystem.
During the summer school, Felix will present research from his PhD thesis, titled "Emergence of the Crypto Commons: Navigating Socio-Technical Affordances and Ideological Tensions on the Blockchain", in conversation with Joel Dietz. Joel is a research fellow at MIT, co-founder of key early initiatives on the cryptocurrency space and director of the Cooperative Futures Institute at Arizona State University.
Furthermore, they will bring to the hackathon research opportunities at the Valley of the Commons, a pop-up village happening later this year in the Austrian Alps.
Clara Schneidewind
Clara Schneidewind is a Research Group Leader at MPI-SP. In her research, she aims to develop solutions for the meaningful, secure, resource-saving, and privacy-preserving usage of blockchain technologies. A main objective of her work is to back all these solutions with strong theoretical foundations in order to ensure the high degree of reliability demanded in the presence of monetary incentives. To this end, she leverages techniques from program analysis, protocol verification, and cryptography.
During the summer school, she will present current work on formalizing the concept of decentralization and trust distribution in complex systems.
Javier Blanco
Talk: Is there a (need for a) philosophy of AI?
Javier Blanco is a computer scientist and philosopher of computation and technology. He got his PhD. in Computer Science (1996) from the University of Eindhoven (TUE) in the Netherlands, and had a one-year postdoctoral fellowship by NWO until 1997, working in Formal Methods. He is currently a full professor at the University of Córdoba, Argentina, and has been the director since 2015 of the Master's program in Technology, Politics and Culture. He has supervised nine completed PhD theses in computer science, philosophy, social science and education.
Joshua Davila
Founding member of Bread Cooperative and author of the book "Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It", Joshua Davila will give a talk about his hands-on experience using smart contracts to build worker cooperatives and financial tools based on solidarity instead of profit.