Samer Hassan

Harvard University & Universidad Complutense de Madrid · Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society

Upon its arrival, the Ethereum blockchain promised to introduce a new paradigm of Internet-based applications that would revolutionize multiple fields, from finance to IoT to the public sector. Until now, scientific efforts have been primarily focused on theoretical discussions about the implications of the technology and on technical proposals to...

The advent of blockchain technology has paved the way for numerous innovations in online governance, with decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) emerging as a prominent development, often referred to as “digital jurisdictions.” Despite experiencing remarkable growth, currently boasting nearly 7M users and $18 billion in assets, DAOs remain r...

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are a new kind of organization that relies on blockchain software to govern their projects. Typically, DAO members may put forward and vote on proposals. For instance these proposals may consist on someone doing some tasks in exchange for a share of the DAO crypto-funds. In recent times, DAOs have gaine...

The arrival of Ethereum in 2013 with its general-purpose programmable blockchain promised to introduce a new paradigm of Internet-based applications. At that moment, enthusiasts anticipated that the application of this new technology would revolutionize multiple fields from finance to healthcare to the public sector, to name but a few. During the s...

Blockchain technology enables new kinds of decentralized systems. Thus, it has often been advocated as a “disruptive” technology that could have the potentiality of reshaping political, economic, and social relations, “solving” problems like corruption, power centralization, and distrust toward political institutions. Blockchain has been gradually...

Blockchain technology has enabled a new kind of distributed systems. Beyond its early applications in Finance, it has also allowed the emergence of novel new ways of governance and coordination. The most relevant of these are the so-called Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). DAOs typically implement decision-making systems to make it pos...

Scientific publication and its Peer Review system strongly rely on a few major industry players controlling most journals (e.g. Elsevier), databases (e.g. Scopus) and metrics (e.g. JCR Impact Factor), while keeping most articles behind paywalls. Critics to such system include concerns about fairness, quality, performance, cost, unpaid labor, transp...

The current state of the web, which is dominated by centralized cloud services, raises several concerns regarding different aspects such as governance, privacy, surveillance, and security. A way to address these issues is to decentralize the platforms by adopting new distributed technologies, such as IPFS and Blockchain, which follow a full peer-to...

Blockchain technology has enabled a new kind of distributed systems. Beyond its early applications in Finance, it has also allowed the emergence of novel new ways of governance and coordination. The most relevant of these are the so-called Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). DAOs typically implement decision-making systems to make it pos...

A DAO is a blockchain-based system that enables people to coordinate and govern themselves mediated by a set of self-executing rules deployed on a public blockchain, and whose governance is decentralised (i.e., independent from central control).

In recent years, the increasing need for global coordination has attracted interest in the governance of global-scale commons. In the current context, we observe how online applications are ubiquitous, and how emerging technologies enable new capabilities while reshaping sectors. Thus, it is pertinent to ask: could blockchain technologies facilitat...

Blockchain technologies have generated enthusiasm, yet their potential to enable new forms of governance remains largely unexplored. Two confronting standpoints dominate the emergent debate around blockchain-based governance: discourses characterized by the presence of techno-determinist and market-driven values, which tend to ignore the complexity...

Peer production communities are based on the collaboration of communities of people, mediated by the Internet, typically to create digital commons, as in Wikipedia or free software. The contribution activities around the creation of such commons (e.g., source code, articles, or documentation) have been widely explored. However, other types of contr...

Peer production online communities are groups of people that collaboratively engage in the building of common resources such as wikis and open source projects. In such communities, participation is highly unequal: few people concentrate the majority of the workload, while the rest provide irregular and sporadic contributions. The distribution of pa...

The current processes of scientific publication and peer review raise concerns around fairness, quality, performance, cost, and accuracy. The Open Access movement has been unable to fulfill all its promises, and a few middlemen publishers can still impose policies and concentrate profits. This paper, using emerging distributed technologies such as...

It is widely accepted that peer production communities show a high level of inequality in the level of participation. Typically, we can observe a power law in the distribution of contributions. However, we argue that participation inequality, and specifically its evolution over time, has been understudied. Previous research has concentrated on larg...

See https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440211002526

See https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440211002526

In recent years, the increasing concerns around the centralized cloud web services (e.g. privacy, governance, surveillance, security) have triggered the emergence of new distributed technologies, such as IPFS or the Blockchain. These innovations have tackled technical challenges that were unresolved until their appearance. Existing models of peer-t...

Nearly a decade after the publication of the white paper in which Bitcoin and Blockchain came to light (Nakamoto, 2008), there remains a need to understand whether the key technical properties introduced by Blockchain, such as decentralisation, inmutatibility and transparency, do indeed offer transformative capacities. For example, could they foste...

Although social networking has become a remarkable feature in the Web, full interoperability has not arrived. This work explores the main 5 paradigms of interoperability across social networking sites, corresponding to the layers in which we an find interoperability. Building on those, a novel analytical framework for SNS interoperability is introd...

“Code is law” is a form of regulation whereby technology is used to enforce existing rules. With the advent of Blockchain and Machine Learning, we are witnessing a new trend, whereby technology is progressively taking the upper-hand over these rules.

"Code is law" refers to the idea that, with the advent of digital technology, code has progressively established itself as the predominant way to regulate the behavior of Internet users. Yet, while computer code can enforce rules more efficiently than legal code, it also comes with a series of limitations, mostly because it is difficult to transpos...

Blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin, is a permissionless distributed database which allows distributed storage and computation over a large network of nodes. This technology has been applied recently to many other fields besides e-currencies (Bitcoin 2.0 projects). In this paper we present Betfunding: a blockchain-based decentralized crowdfun...

Real-time collaboration is being offered by plenty of libraries and APIs (Google Drive Real-time API, Microsoft Real-Time Communications API, TogetherJS, ShareJS), rapidly becoming a mainstream option for web-services developers. However, they are offered as centralised services running in a single server, regardless if they are free/open source or...

Real-time collaboration is being offered by multiple libraries and APIs (Google Drive Real-time API, Microsoft Real-Time Communications API, TogetherJS, ShareJS), rapidly becoming a mainstream option for webservices developers. However, they are offered as centralised services running in a single server, regardless if they are free/open source or p...

Social innovation presents new opportunities for participation and inclusion. Yet, many social innovation projects or initiatives are characterised by a power law distribution, where a large majority of contributions are provided by a very small portion of people. Besides, most of these initiatives lack a systematic structure and incentivization me...

Commons-based peer-production (CBPP) constitutes today an important driver for innovation and cultural development, both online and offline. This led to the establishment of an alternative, Commons-based ecosystem, based on peer-production and collaboration of peers contributing to a common good. Yet, to the extent that this operates outside of the...

This paper presents a set of guidelines, imported from the field of forecasting, that can help social simulation and, more specifically, agent-based modelling practitioners to improve the predictive performance and the robustness of their models. The presentation starts with a discussion on the current debate on prediction in social processes, foll...

Los movimientos sociales sufren múltiples dificultades en su organización, comunicación, colaboración y planificación a largo plazo. Comunes es un colectivo sin ánimo de lucro con el objetivo de minimizar dichas dificultades y facilitar el trabajo de los movimientos sociales, mediante recursos y herramientas web libres, que tratan de fomentar los b...

Como resultado de los desarrollos actuales de la inteligencia artificial distribuida, la simulación social mediante ordenador puede considerarse una metodología de investigación, similar en cuanto a su lógica a otras modalidades de método científico en general, ya que consiste en 1) formalizar teorías complejas sobre determinados procesos sociales...

A major challenge in agent-based modelling is the management of the process to generate executable simulations from the initial conceptual models. This process is complex and usually involves several roles, which may raise communication problems due to the diverse backgrounds and perspectives of participants and the use of non-explicit knowledge. T...

Agent-Based Modelling is gaining wider acceptance as a paradigm for social research. However, it still presents limitations in the management of the process to generate the simulations from the initial conceptual models. This makes it difficult to reuse the knowledge from available models and to adapt it to different hypotheses. This paper proposes...

Social relationships such as friendship and partner choice are ruled by the proximity principle, which states that the more similar two individuals are, the more likely they will become friends. However, proximity, similarity, and friendship are concepts with blurred edges and imprecise grades of membership. This study shows how to simulate these...

Agent-based models informed by empirical data are growing in popularity. Many models make extensive use of collected data for the development, initialisation or validation. In parallel, models are growing in size and complexity, generating large amounts of output data. On the other hand, Data Mining is used to extract hidden patterns from large col...

The promise of agent-based for explicating properties of social systems has not yet been fully realized. Agent models sometimes provide only a veneer of, rather than substantive engagement with, social behavior. The problem will be illustrated with Axelrod's ...

Agent-Based Modelling is gaining wider acceptance as a paradigm for social research. However, it still present limitations in the management of the process to generate the simulations from the initial conceptual models. Thus, it is difficult to reuse the knowledge from available models and adapt it to different hypotheses. This paper proposes the u...

KeywordsSocial simulation-Artificial intelligence-Agent-based modelling-IJCAI

Agent-based simulation is being recognized as a useful tool for the study of social systems. It is based on the idea that agents can be used as a good abstraction of members of a society, and by simulating their interactions, observe the emergent behavior. Usually, agent-based models for social simulation are rather simple, but there are more and m...

Many agent-based models, use ­standard distributions in several steps of the design: configuring the initial conditions of simulations, distributing objects spatially, and determining exogenous factors or aspects of the agents’ behaviour. An alternative approach that is growing in ­popularity is data-driven agent-based simulation. This paper encour...

Agent based models are useful to study emergent behaviour in social systems. In general, existing agent models tend to be quite sim-ple, but there are social problems that require the consideration of some aspects with uncertainty as human thinking does. Those characteris-tics can be addressed by using fuzzy sets theory in the specification of the...

This work presents an agent based simulation model dealing with the evolution of social values in a 20 year period of the Spanish society, approaching it from Inglehart’s theories on the subject. Surveys are taken as input to build the model by following a data-driven approach. This has been formalised in a methodology for introducing microsimulati...

Modelling the evolution of moral values in a society is a complex problem that involves many interwined aspects. The approach presented in this paper takes information from a common tool of sociologists, public surveys, as input to build the model by following a data-driven approach, to analyse and interpret the impact of each factor separately, an...

Although there are many methodologies for the development of multi-agent systems, these are scarcely applied for agent-based simulation. The different activities for the creation of an agent based model and its simulation for the study of a social system, which include abstraction, design, approximation and coding, are usually performed in a monoli...

Sociological research shows that friendship and partner choice tend to reveal a bias toward social similarity. These relations are ruled by the so called "proximity principle" which states that the more similar two individuals are, the more likely they will become friends. However, proximity, similarity or friend- ship are concepts with blurred edg...

Agent-based modelling facilitates the implementation of tools for the analysis of social patterns. This comes from the fact that agent related concepts allow the representation of organizational and behavioural aspects of individuals in a society and their interactions. An agent can characterize an individual with capabilities to perceive and react...

The \Keep It Simple, Stupid" principle is a recommended rule for modelling complex phenomena. However, there must be a com- promise between simplication and expressiveness, determined by the re- sults produced by the model. Here we propose to gradually increase the complexity of a model, so we can improve its behaviour. This incremen- tal \deepenin...

In the last few years an increasing number of more compli- cated Agent-Based Models have been designed with the aim of approach- ing reality more closely, usually by introducing more and more empirical data. In this paper we review different approaches that could be adopted: KISS, KIDS and a new one that lies between both. We then propose a new logi...

Simple models of agents have been used to study emergent behaviour in social systems. However, when considering the evolution of values in human societies, there is a need for the consideration of more complex agent models, which take into account uncertainty in human thinking. This characteristic can be addressed by using fuzzy logic in the specif...

There exist various narrative systems, focused on different parts of the complex process of story generation. Some of them are oriented to content planning, and some to sentence planning, with different properties and characteristics. In this paper we propose a system based on BDI agents that generates stories (creating content, performing content...

La simulación social basada en agentes constituye hoy una alternativa para avanzar en el conocimiento sociológico desde una perspectiva metodológica novedosa, poseedora de una potencial vocación integradora. Su aplicación adquiere especial sentido cuando existe una cierta abundancia de datos cuantitativos, cualitativos, observaciones longitudinales...

This paper presents a proposal for implementing automated story telling of narrative threads within a multiplayer game based on selec-tion and linearization of game logs. Our initial prototype operates on logs generated artificially by a social simulation built by a multiagent system. This provides a log of events for a large set of characters em-u...

This paper presents an initial decomposition of the pro-cess of creative storytelling into subtasks that are relevant for studying where and how creativity plays a role from a computational point of view. Five basic subtasks are identified: building a world to act as setting for the story (including characters, locations, possible actions), gener-a...

DEVS1 es un formalismo matemático de modelado y simulación basado en conceptos de sistemas dinámicos genéricos con conceptos bien definidos de acoplamiento de componentes, jerarquía, construcción modular de modelos. Nuestro proyecto se basa en la construcción de un editor gráfico de modelos que siguen el formalismo DEVS, y en su integración con una...

Even though Agent Based Social Simulation is beginning to be spread out as a powerful quantitative method for sociologists, it is still far from attracting qualitative ones. We propose to broaden ABSS horizons with a system that returns outputs useful for both paradigms. The case used as example is the study of the evolution of religiosity in the S...

Along the last years, the Data-driven approach in Social Sim-ulation is gaining more and more strength. Thus, the use of large col-lections of empirical data is becoming more frequent, and new demands emerge. This work attempts to contribute to the debate proposing the intense use of Data Mining for the improvement and development of Data-driven Ag...

Resumen. La simulación con agentes software abre nuevas posibilidades para el estudio de fenómenos sociales. La teoría de agentes software facilita el mode-lado de los aspectos organizativos y de comportamiento de los individuos de una sociedad. Un agente puede representar un individuo en una sociedad, que percibe y reacciona ante los eventos de su...

Resumen Este artículo desarrolla el proceso de aplicación de diversos conceptos de lógica borrosa a un sistema de simulación social basado en agentes software inteligentes, con un modelo teórico sociológico subyacente. El sistema ya estaba implementado utilizando únicamente variables y relaciones nítidas. Diversos conceptos sociológicos han sido 'f...

Most agent-based models use uniform random distributions to configure the values of initial conditions in simulations. Moreover, ran- dom values are often used to distribute ob jects spatially, to determine unmeasured exogenous factors, and sometimes to determine aspects of the agents' behaviour. An alternative approach to the design and ini- tialis...

El proyecto aborda, desde una perspectiva multidisciplinar, la integración de métodos y herramientas de los campos de la ingeniería del software, la inteligencia artificial y la sociología. Así, se pretende simular la complejidad de las sociedades humanas desde el diseño de un modelo sociológico. Este modelo tratará de simplificar la realidad extra...