Introduction to DeSci - Joshua Bate | DeSciWorld

hello wow this is big this is the biggest thing I've ever done nice okay so thank you for that very nice introduction milosh yeah as he says my name is Joshua bate and I'm the founder of Desire world so just quickly who here knows what Desai is see some some passionate hands going up nice who here is a scientist or a researcher and who here is interested in science but is not a scientist or researcher okay great so this should be interesting for you guys so this presentation is an introduction to Desai there's many things happening on a very deep level in DSi this is a high level overview okay so we're not going to go too deep into the technicalities I'll just give you an overview of what DSi is and what it's trying to achieve so if you go to ethereum.org forward slash DSi you'll find a DSi page and you'll find a whole bunch of information lots of good links and this definition so I'll just read it so DSi is a movement that aims to build public infrastructure for funding creating reviewing crediting storing and disseminating scientific knowledge fairly and equitably using the keyword here the web 3 stack so that is the de part of the DSi DSi has kind of moved onward from the open science movement which a lot of people may have heard of and have used DSi is specifically integrating web 3 technology in particular in this case ethereum when I talk about DC I like to put it into four core categories or four pillars of Desai so these four pillars are funding data publishing and organization I'll go a bit more deeply into these throughout the presentation but just as a high level funding is essentially already built because the D5 ecosystem is being built for the past you know three or four or five years decentralized funding sources allowable people to unlock the potential of their research if you are for example a researcher in Harvard typically you can only get funding from the NIH or Harvard or any other sort of governmental institution if you're a researcher and you're not at Harvard you're for example working out of your back Garden then you have to fund it yourself and that's often very difficult so a lot of science doesn't get done purely because of this funding bottleneck decentralized funding sources can be made programmable for example they have you know Milestones if you achieve this scientific outcome then you receive this funding it can be crowdsourced it can be governed by a protocol like a dow for example many sort of possibilities that really change the way that scientists can receive the money in order to do their projects the second point is data again blockchain is inherently a data protocol data storage is already being revolutionized by blockchain but in the scientific Paradigm with things like sensitive data patient data reproducibility for with regards to the data these can all be improved and almost revolutionized again through the blockchain infrastructure data storage is leading to changes in the data storage Paradigm will lead to things like improved reproducibility recently there was some controversy with the Alzheimer's research maybe 20 years of Alzheimer's research was founded based on false assumptions in the beginning that's because the data that was submitted for some of these uh some of these experiments was hard to the provenance was hard to track and so we based some of the issues on that data and if that data was open source or the the provenance Trail for example was more transparent then we wouldn't have wasted 20 years and how many billions of dollars of research funding publishing for me is the biggest concern in science right now right now Publishers I just bring a nature for example elsevier was recently in the news there was a guardian article about elsevier's editors walking out Publishers the centralized Publishers in particular they hold a monopoly really on the the scientific papers that get put out this is because of a couple of reasons but mainly because of their brand or their Mark or their sort of their reputation if you're a scientist and you publish you want to publish a paper if you can get it into nature then it's worth a lot more funders will fund you universities will put you on tenure and your science that you get done will be much more prestigious just by being put through these publishing protocols however this is a Walled Garden right you can imagine if you're someone from I don't know uh for example Russia right it's an example if you're a scientist doing good good research but you're from a country that's kind of under the sanctions right now you're not going to be considered for publishing on this on this platform even though you have nothing to do with any of the political climates but your science is good you just won't be you won't be accepted and this extends from to all over the world you can look at Africa or Latin America or any things like this if you don't qualify for the uh the in-group often you don't get funded and you don't get published so publishing is a big thing that's being sorted through the decentralized infrastructure we'll go a bit more into that in a moment and finally organization organization within the scientific Community is something that's kind of broken right if you're working at a university or a research institution you could be running 10 you know five years worth of experiments on a particular problem and another institution half a mile down the road could be working on the same problem and you would never know and you'd both be working on that problem you'd both be wasting your time and resources when you could be collaborating this is a very you know a very oversimplified example of the general Trend in science right now for organization to be very broken and the scientific communities generally don't collaborate very well the Dow infrastructure which I'm sure everybody here knows around knows about will improve this massively not just on a global scale but also on a local scale so what can DSi achieve scientific innovation right now is limited by several factors misaligned incentives these make it very difficult for scientists to make science their career right if you can't afford to live if you want to do the science that you want to do then you have to either change job or change the science that you want to do a lot of corporate infrastructure requires science to be done for example the pharmaceutical Industries if you're a pharmaceutical industry and you want someone to test a chemical that you want to put into your Pharmacy or Pharmaceuticals you will find a scientist that's willing to do it and you'll pay him a lot of money but if you're a scientist and wants to study something else or maybe that this chemical is bad for consumption you often won't receive the funding and you won't receive the incentives for doing so so misaligned incentives here really hampers true Innovation especially in a in a net positive direction selective funding is a similar concept here institutional constraints as I mentioned this is a corporate institutional constraint but this extends to things like universities research institutions and generally there is a massive sort of correlation between research institutions universities and funders and these tend to control the the direction of Science and the narratives of which science is practiced under and accessibility concerns as I mentioned if you're from a country that is sort of out of luck for example it's very difficult for you to get access to the knowledge to the resources the laboratory equipment to do the science you want to do invariably this leads to the thing called brain drain which people may be familiar with for example if you're a scientist in Nairobi and you're doing fantastic groundbreaking research ninety percent of the time you'll be taken off to a Western University to do your research there which means that you don't contribute anything at all to the local economy in Kenya and therefore you you know your country suffers as a result and most of those gains goes to the big Corporate West so DC proposes a solution by decentralizing science and Academia using blockchain Technologies to remove Gatekeepers open up funding and improve diversity of opportunity so what is standing in dci's way at DSi World in particular we like to put into these four categories so the DSi Community right now is nascent it's very early and it's disorganized belief in the technology of web3 is very shaky not just in DSi in defy and art and governance and everything like this but especially in DSi adoption from institutions is some ways off again applies to most of web3 but for for DSI it's a very important thing to have that institutional adoption because scientists are generally risk adverse people and are like unlikely to adopt this technology unless it is endorsed by those institutions and as with all of web 3 right now the user experience does leave a lot to be desired this is you know this is true for all of web3 but in science in particular the traditional scientific Paradigm is you know lots of uh dark Grays Navy Blues this sort of very very similar monotonous color schemes in DC what we're trying to do is show people that science can actually be fun and interesting and inspiring in itself so at DSi world we have you know you can't see it so well on this screen but that's actually green that text it's the desire World green as we're calling it and purple so you know purple and green is fun it's something a bit different um but it it's a bit tongue-in-cheek but it's a real thing that we're trying to do here is to inspire a little bit more aesthetic pleasure in the scientific Paradigm as well so this this slide is the inverse of this so what is standing in its way and how can we push it forward so to push DC4 we have to improve organization amongst projects and peers within the DSi Paradigm but also within Academia in general inspire people with belief in the power of these decentralized Technologies provide tangible and economically viable use cases this is what will bring the institutions the scientists the next 10 million scientists into DSi is these economically viable use cases and we need to improve the user experience and the onboarding flow to get people from Academia into DSi this is just some examples of the ecosystem hands up if you recognize any of these good the institutions are coming hell yeah so just a quick that one in the middle is DSi labs they recently just raised 6.3 million this one at the bottom left here is lab Dow they just raised 3.6 million uh second from the left at the top they raised like 1.5 or something bottom right there is vitadel they are a decentralized protocol but they've raised quite a bit of money from uh sources including Pfizer Ventures which is a bit interesting but and also some other interesting projects up here but these are just some examples of some of the projects building in the ecosystem okay so these four core pillars right how do we improve them this is a bit of a breakdown in organization the Advent of the Dow has allowed distributed communities to collaborate and organize like never before so using some basic web 3 Technologies such as treasury management tools right this is huge for scientists if you have funds and you are able to leverage those funds how you wish earn some yield on them for example through defy or control them through token gated governance this is massive for scientists because they have Sovereign access and Sovereign ownership over their own funding incentive mechanisms for organizations when you can use tokens as you wish you can create in the center of mechanisms within your own Community within your own organization if you're a scientist and you want someone in your organization to you know to do the groundwork crunch the numbers you can incentivize them in your own manner with some tokens for example or with additional governance potential or whatever and collaboration within the Dow is very much more improved but also Dao two Dao when you have a uniform infrastructure for example like ethereum it's very much more easy to to collaborate with each other a lot of scientists will use multiple different operating systems different coding languages and this is a big issue DSi has the possibility the capabilities here to inspire a lot of change in DSi and Inspire scientists to go and do things as they see fit it's not just science itself the you know the crunching of the numbers the raising of the funds it's the concept of what it means to do science that is changing in science right now we we follow the judeo-christian Western rationalist thinking process which is fantastic and has got us this amazing room with this amazing technology it's done fantastic things but throughout Humanity there have been multiple other schools of thought that have guided Humanity through some great progresses also we've lost all of the access to that and if you believe any of these things or if you if you decide to try and incorporate some of these unknown aspects into your Western rationalist science it's almost a hearsay and you get laughed out the room whilst we don't know the extent of some things like this it's important to be able to consider them in your research and to be able to consider them as part of the Paradigm of being a human so this bottom one here pursue your own truth is something that I'm very passionate about I don't I don't know I don't claim to know certain things that other scientists don't but I think there are things that is unknown in this world and it's very important for us to be able to research those and to be able to put real funding and real structure behind it it's inspiring because it can reduce gatekeeping and elitism again if you're from some another country you can't get involved in science normally so you just don't become a scientist instead you become an engineer or something like this maybe you can now if you can get access to that funding and that knowledge you can earn a fair share for your research a lot of people hang up their PHD immediately after getting it because there's no money in it well maybe there is now when the incentive mechanisms are changed and you can access resources treatments on knowledge that maybe you couldn't get before as a patient for example if the access to a life-saving drug is held behind a lot of regulatory barriers this can open it up for you and that can change your life and maybe even save your life some economically powerful use cases here these are what will bring the required eyes and wallets to the space so in the publishing sector you have publishing models so for example you know a platform to publish itself incentive models if you're a scientist and you publish what about if you get paid every time somebody cites your work or you're paid to publish for those that don't know as a scientist you must pay to have your paper published and then you must pay again to read your paper I believe the going rate for an article in nature is about 30 000 USD so you do the work at your own expense you have to pay to have it published and then you have to pay again for subscription to read it it sounds crazy but it's actually how it works um so these publishing models will be scientists will go wherever is best for Science and when this is a you know a viable alternative when the system works they will go there and this will be a very profitable Venture for all involved data sharing Open Access can lead to massive Innovations in in the healthcare sector for example the biotech sector the space exploration sector for example getting involved on the ground level of that is a very profitable Venture also the traceability of date of the blockchain enables us to hold people to account it helps us to reduce grift in the academic processes for example the funding use cases are self-evident I've just spoken about a lot about them all of these things combined leads DSi to become in my opinion the most Salient use case for blockchain Technologies D5 is great and D5 is necessary as a foundation but D PSI is the thing that is going to be empowered most by crypto and finally at DSi world this is mainly what we try and handle is the onboarding of people into DSi so the inaccessibility of science coupled with the poor ux of web3 makes onboarding an uphill battle so what can we do to fix that so primarily we should educate people on the benefits of web3 the benefits of techno of this technology and the benefits of DSi then educate them how to get involved safely and securely avoid scams or this kind of obvious stuff creativity and Design it's inspiring for scientists who are typically seeing you know just boring every every scientific front every science front end is just boring as heck right but if you could look at it and it can inspire you it's got some beautiful art to it it's got some interesting ideas it's got some different schools of thought that in itself can onboard can bring you into the design space the collaboration being open and easy makes it easier to bring people on and the ambition of DSi to really change science as we know it to change the concept of publishing to change the concept of funding within science is so ambitious and so sexy for scientists that they're unlikely to sort of walk away once they know so these are the things that we're doing at DSi World um and we hope to try and succeed so a little bit more about DSi world we aim to become the social and coordination layer for DSI a starting point from which everybody should be able to get access to DSi a resource oriented focal point for the community so here are some of our products we have information aggregation products we have a dashboard which is looks a little bit like this but with more projects on now we have a dashboard we have a job board we have some kind of other data analysis Services being built in the background right now if you have a DSi project you can list it for free on our dashboard we have a development launch pad so we help people to launch their dials or their nfts for DSI a lot of D scientists don't really know how to do it but they want to do it so they can come to us and we do it for them we do peer-to-peer interactions we have a peer-to-peer interactive Marketplace which allows you to do peer-to-peer funding for research researchers can put up a grant proposal and someone can come along and fund it peer-to-peer only and education and finally we have a conferences and events so we're actually trying to become almost a Devcon of DSi and we actually have our first event which I'll tell you about very shortly here in Belgrade tomorrow and Sunday so I would invite everybody here to come if you have the time over those two days so here's some information about the world of Desai Belgrade event so we are DSi world and this conference circuit is going to be called world of Desai it's going to go around the world specifically non-western Europe and non-north American states so Latin America Asia Eastern Europe uh you name it you know Africa for example this is a buy yearly so twice a year we're going to do this and our first event is in Belgrade tomorrow and Sunday our idea here is that there's a lot of events happening in DSi within Western Europe and within North America right now and we don't need more what we need is actually DSi projects to go out to these places and show the true potential of Desai which is to bring the scientific infrastructure to these places and allow them to do the science in their own countries so here's some points it's uh it's tomorrow and Sunday 10 a.

m to 4 30 p.m there'll be panels presentations and workshops it's an interesting mix of DC Builders people like myself local academics local students from the Belgrade universities it's a great location it's got an after-party good food and there are t-shirts I know people like t-shirts take a look at that schedule if you like it's also on our website at dsi.world Belgrade um I've got a little joke here I don't know if it's controversial so I'm going to say it uh the location is this place there's a group called The House of web3 and they've done a fantastic job of giving us their location to to use without them this wouldn't have been happening I recommend you go speak to them if you don't know them a guy called Alexi mcgitko that's the location with the Red Dot it's actually part of the old complex of the mega Trend University which I know has some controversy in this country which I did not know before I only found out when I went on to Wikipedia and found out that these guys were given a PhD by megatrend University so if you know these guys they actually are doctors of cosmology so they got their doctorate from the Megatron University it is no longer active it is a defunct University now one of the buildings that they used is now owned by house of web 3 which is where we are running it um honestly I thought I was in a simulation I was reading through the Wikipedia like Mega Trend University and it says the bogdanov brothers are doctors from there anyways um so this is some final points that's a link tree with loads of stuff about DSi world please scan it if you haven't and that contact is my personal contact my telegram if you're interested in DSi if you want to get involved in DSi world please scan it feel free to contact me I will say for anybody in the room who's interested in this sort of thing we are going through a round right now it is a decentralized round only so it is not available to you so we're not signing a Saft it is a crowdfund basically and ticket sizes are one thousand dollars to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars so anyone big or small can get involved in this round and you're very much welcome to so thank you very much I'm open the floor to any questions if anyone has any uh yeah thanks [Applause] any questions yes I can hear you yeah so how is biohacking connected to DSi how will DSi help biohackers um you may have heard of zuzalu recently was a network state that was happening did you hear of it zuzalu okay so zuzulu or zuzalu happened in Montenegro for the last two months it was run by vitalik and a group called vitadel and vitadel were up on that slide earlier at the bottom right there they are a longevity decentralized longevity funding platform or longevity Dao called Vita Dal um them in conjunction with vitalik did the two-month Network State experiment in Montenegro in pogaritza and it was great I went there for a week a lot of biohackers there generally there is a massive overlap between the longevity crew the biohacking crew and the crypto crew and they are finding their home right now in Desai so you'd actually find that the biohacking crew if you if you have friends who are in biohacking and crypto more than likely they're going to be gravitating or already in the D size space things like decentralized funding for access to biohacking you know for the funding for to do the biohacking research itself the production of those those drugs the recording of the effects of those drugs the publishing of Science of that sometimes will be blocked almost by traditional institutions if they're somewhat controversial well in DC you can you can do the research you can fund it and publish it without anyone telling you not to a lot of people in the biohacking space are using this this is this potential to basically go ahead with their research any other questions okay thank you [Applause]