Introduction
Speakers: Andrew Miller, Neha Narula
Transcript By: Bryan Bishop
Category: Conference
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Introduction
Andrew Miller && Neha Narula
Hi everyone, I am Neha Narula, thank you for being here. I am director of DCI which is based out of Media Lab here. Hi I am Andrew Miller.
The first phd for computer science was awarded in 1965. We’re seeing that 55 years later, computer science is the most popular undergraduate majors at many major universities. This recognizes an important discipline whose approaches and techniques are being applied to many different fields. In fact, this year MIT is starting a whole new college of computing.
Looking through that lense, it seems possible that cryptocurrency and blockchain has the potential to become its own discipline. This is a rapidly developing area and it has grabbed a lot of attention of practicioners and academics. It requires new ideas and synthesis across these different disciplines.
Importantly, much needed new voices are entering the space, like economists and lawyers, new developers and new scholars. As this has happened, the number of cryptocurrency manuscripts has continued to grow. This has made it difficult for newcomers to identify the most impactful cryptocurrency research.
Also, there’s discussions in non-traditional venues like IRC, forum posts and the mailing lists. We want to also bring in ethics and conflicts of interest when we’re explaining and talking about our work. How do we talk about funding? This is an important question.
There are many new ideas being worked on; there’s a lost opportunity for a quality distribution channel for explanation and analysis.
This cryptoeconmics systems summit is the kickoff meeting for our new journal. The goal of this journal is to provide a new interdisciplinary venue that is well suited to take on this goal and a forum for interdisciplinary research for this new field of cryptocurrency and cryptoeconomics. Many of you here have agreed to serve on our program committee; we’ll be reviewing a bunch of papers over the next few months. Thank you for agreeing to participate with us on this.
My background is computer science, but peer review is the life blood of academia. It’s about providing constructive feedback to people doing research, and to promote a high standard for rigor and quality in the work that we put out. It makes sense to focus on peer review and put together disciplines to build this new field. Peer review is also important to cryptocurrency and through code review and mailing list discussions. This is an important area to bridge between practicioners and industry.
My goal for the summit is to get feedback from you all regarding our goals and the processes we want to put in place. I think this is a nice opportunity to experiment with peer review, and use blockchain to help peer review itself. I want to get feedback on the different kinds of standards for validation across different academic fields which would be applied to cryptocurrency and cryptoeconomics.