 Good morning everyone and thanks for the introduction. I'm working for an ETH spin-off, Validity Labs, it's a company that is specializing in development of decentralized applications. I will spend the next 15 minutes before your coffee break on the crisis in research and what kind of opportunities we actually have now for collaborating and making a change in that space. The issues today were already covered pretty well, such as the open science. Why is the science right? It's not really, it's really open. Why do we have a produced ability crisis? I'm sure every one of you have their own personal opinion and experience in all these spaces, like why we don't really have a fair metric also for research impact, etc. So I'm not going to go through it, but I would like to focus on one particular issue that I think is very relevant and very important, and it is that science has actually been going through a transition in the past 30 years. So with this case of the US funding, you actually can see how as a function of time the funding was coming into R&D, that includes academic and non-academic research sector, and how the funding with the green line was federally funded. That is government and then the business is a blue line. So you see that in the past 30 years, the funding coming from the government has been decreasing dramatically and has been overtaken by the business interests and the business input. Given that we have two types of research, we have basic research, and that is the one that is actually contributing most to our advancement of knowledge and most groundbreaking discoveries. This 50% of that research is being done by academia, but the funding for that is extremely disproportionate. So businesses tend to rather fund applied research. This is also of course important, but it's not in the interest of businesses because to translate what we have in basic research, it takes about 20, 30 years to bring into the marketplace. So basic research is extremely disadvantaged. And to make matters worse, we all know that the number of papers is a function of time. This looks somewhat like this. At the same time, the number of companies that have R&D departments that are publishing is actually decreasing with time. So the science and the contribution from them to science is being decreasingly open year by year. So what's the natural solution to it and how can we in a way save basic research? Well, we have to force governments to put more money back into basic research and fund academics that are struggling. But this is not realistic. So social scientists and economists say that the solution to it is to align industry and academic interests to try to find a way that we can collaborate together. But let's not kid ourselves, right? Already in the 40s, people came up with the concept of norms and science. So those were four principles that scientists agreed are extremely important for the science output and that is communality. So sharing ownership of all the data is a human race that owns our scientific output. We do it for everybody. We have universality and that means that these findings should be judged based on the merit and based on their quality. We have disinterestedness, which means a work should be free of self-interested motivation. We shouldn't be pursuing wealth but knowledge and skepticism. So even if we spend years on our research finding we should still be able to evaluate all the evidence and if this evidence contradicts our body of work we should be able to say we were wrong. Then there are counter norms and the counter norms are if you look at it and if you're still with me at this point they are much more applicable to the business sector. So this is the fact that we need to protect our priority in publishing or a priority in filing a patent. It's particularism and that means that it's a lot easier with all the papers that are coming out of there. It's a lot easier to judge the quality based on reputation be it the reputation of a university or even a research group rather than actually look at the quality of the paper output. It's self-interestedness because their funding is so scarce that we are financing ways to game the system and we compete for funding, recognition or for money. And then dogmatism because we spend so much time investing in promoting our own work, not really thinking so much critically about ourselves. And the funny thing is that social scientists were looking at these two norms in scientists today and they were finding that scientists were rather reporting that they follow themselves, norms in science but everybody else follows counter norms. So given that business interests are driven by these counter norms, people are trying to experiment with technology and try to find some solution that will actually resonate a lot better with norms and provide the right incentives because the counter norms are driven by the wrong incentives and that's, in my opinion, scarce funding. So four blockchain characteristics which come to play, they resonate very well with norms. Just think about decentralization, the fact that you try to spread power and influence over your many peers and that fosters communality. This intermediation, that is, if you remove the structure that with its reputation gives a stamp on a paper that this is a really good work, this fosters then the universality. Economic incentives, if we manage to build a system that is going to have right incentives in it and will give more power but also money, maybe to the researchers, we will be fostering this interestedness. And then transparency, of course, if you open up, if you show exactly what you did step by step, display your entire workflow, you open up to scrutiny and you foster skepticism. So this is one of the examples that was done by our CTO Sebastian and by Martin, who's co-organizing this conference. It's about research pipeline. I don't know how well you can see it, but it consists of three parts. Number one is the acquisition of data in an experiment. Number two is doing a pipeline, research pipeline analysis, and then three is interpretation. And what you can do is you can put that data onto the interplanetary file system. Then you can also notarize who did what. So you have on top the first part was done by an operator, second by analyst, and third by publisher. So in this way you can track the entire pipeline, you can actually give people credit for what they have done. Is this the right solution? Is blockchain the right solution? Everybody today who is speaking, we're saying that we don't know, right? So finding out will take a certain degree of experimentation. So we decided to test three hypotheses. And that is number one. The solution that we're going to find will be propagating well and is going to be sustainable. This is necessary for it to make sense, right? If we first of all educate people and educate them across many relevant key players that were mentioned before in the question session about the blockchain technology, what it really can do and what it really cannot. So people don't have some puffed up expectations. And B, we need to raise awareness about issues in science. I'm sure now you're a very educated crowd. You know about these things, but if you ask PhD students or postdocs at the department, everybody is unhappy about the situation. They would like to change, but they feel that they're alone and they have zero impact. They can make zero impact. If you convince them that's not the case, you can actually use their power and use their demo's resources. Now the second hypothesis is that we will find better solutions and they will be found a lot faster if we combine interdisciplinary expertise of many people at the same time. And the third one is that the transition between the current state of the art into a new kind of scientific ecosystem will be a lot more effective if we do it simultaneously among a number of key players in this ecosystem. And that's what we call seeding. So the method would be what we discussed also during the questions that we really, it's really important that we invite to the whole discussion librarians, funding organizations, publishers, executives, investors, policymakers, technologists, researchers, and whoever else is involved in the whole infrastructure. And they have to at the same time be able to in this kind of decentralized way make the further step. Now we put them in Davos in February into the place that hosts an annual World Economic Forum meeting. And they will be for the first two days, first of all discussing the whole problems and bottlenecks in the collaborative research space that we made a word of them from the perspective of also not only open science but also economics of science. And then we will train them about blockchain mechanisms, governance, economics, and also a little bit development. Then we'll also show a number of applications in research and industry so that they get a feeling like where it is applicable. And then for the next two days, they will be subdivided into groups based on their interests where they would like to contribute the most. They will be given mentors from those areas and they will be also given design thinking experts. They will also be able to send messages for the implementation of new blockchain backed solutions and maybe tools. In this way, we will create new ideas. People will be able to pitch those ideas on stage and the decentralized autonomous organization that they will become a part of will be able to pick the best solution in their opinion that is most actionable. And the winners will advance to the incubator. The next three months is going to be an incubator. We will be working in the crypto valley in Switzerland and we will be there and the teams will be working with us remotely. So the whole three months will be sacrificed for the development of proofs of concept and the teams will have a freedom to make their commitment. So if nobody in other words has time and wants to go to the next stage, we will still guarantee that it will be executed and we will build it. The next three months will be open sourced. That means we foster the communality principle of norms and science. And the whole point is that after this experiment we want to push a little bit more the whole ecosystem towards sustainable blockchain backed networks for collaborative research or norms and science. And that means not only incentivizing collaboration and openness and science but it also means trying to find a way to research perhaps as well and to primarily empower the community. Because you know what, the situation is so dramatic that research now says that most brilliant people in the academic system, that PhD students, the very young ones, 33% of them are at the risk of the common psychiatric disorder. That situation is not dramatic. What are we doing? So Isaac Newton has written a letter to his collaborator who actually collaborated with his opponent. If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants and I really hope that in my lifetime I'm going to see that philosophy and that principle being widely adopted in science. And I'm going to be here until Wednesday, including Wednesday, so please do come to me and ask me anything if you want to participate in that program, sponsor, volunteer, whatever, ask me about astrophysics because I'm an astrophysicist. And otherwise, thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, Alexander. Are there any questions? Maybe I can ask one. So I liked, I mean, in response to the talk of Ulrich Dillager in the beginning, I mean, I think the solutions in the end, also this experiment that we did with Sebastian, I mean, it's very simple, right? So, I mean, how do you think this style will be working out? What's the idea behind, I mean, because there's a challenge that people may just find it overly complicated or burdensome to engage in this? So actually becoming a part of the DAO is going to be extremely simple. People will walk everybody during their training through it and you will have a possibility to vote on the teams that will be pitching in the end their ideas. But it won't be, I don't think it's overly complicated. I think even building your own very simple DAO will be a couple of lines of code. We will also show it during the steps on Wednesday during the workshops. Yeah, yes. So it's a place where lots of companies are driven to in Switzerland, in Zug. It's partially because it's a beautiful place in terms of tax perks. It's pretty low. But yeah, so a lot of companies go in there. It's also Ethereum Foundation has their headquarters. And yeah, it's just a place where a lot of companies are and it's booming. And you basically walk into the city and you see already left and right everybody's pasting blockchain all over the town. So that's why it's getting this name of being a crypto valley, kind of like a Silicon Valley equivalent, but for the crypto world. So just... I wonder how far are we away from a status quo where I can set up my own smart contract or DAO with Lego brick-like tools. So I want to have the benefit of what you described without having to dive into technical details like solidity, which is, I hope, understandable. And I would like to know from you what do you think about this? How far are we into this direction that we have this Lego brick-like thing that can actually do stuff? We're actually very close. So there are a number of projects that are trying to integrate different kinds of platforms so that you can very easily either build also your DAO decentralized autonomous organization or maybe you can incorporate a couple of tools that are not off blockchain, but you can build them together and give them kind of the backend in a lot easier way, right, than being able to know solidity but having said that, it's also not very tricky. The whole coding and the whole smart contract that you can write can be extremely simple. Yeah, but there's lots of projects. And I think one of the things to refer back to the conversation before, why do we need blockchain at all? I mean, let's think about it. In order to fix science and fix these incentives that we talked about, even though there's been 20 years campaigning for open science, like still scientists, even though they have access journal, they don't do it open access. It's because it's in our culture. It's because we're driven by very scarce funding and competition. So if we could leverage the fact that there's a lot of money and a lot of attention and a lot of people actually are very interested in the topic. If we use that momentum in order to help our basic research, I mean, this is amazing because I know that there are equivalents like peer-to-peer, whatever. But you need to move people collectively at the same time to make a difference. So why won't we use the fact that we're just giving it right now on the plate? Great. Thank you very much. And maybe just to add, why don't we add some science fiction to it, right? So I think that's a cool way to go. And with this, we are closing the session and we extend the break a bit so there will be half an hour break until 11.15. Okay?