Background
The interdisciplinary nature of crypto-economic systems sets the foundation for the development of Token Engineering — the new crypto-native discipline to design, verify and optimise crypto-economic systems. Here, we can draw from a variety of existing disciplines to come up with new solutions to crypto challenges.
In our brand new series of guest lectures at TE Academy, we offer an introduction to Computational Social Choice.
Key Problem or Topic Area
Social Choice deals with designing and analysing algorithmic and game-theoretic principles that are applicable for making community decisions that respect the preferences of the community members. This includes tasks as varied as how to divide resources among agents, match agents to resources, and make joint decisions that are acceptable and beneficial to the community as a whole. Such algorithms are crucial in crypto both for network-level operations such as selecting a validator committee and reaching a voting-based consensus and governance-level operations such as changing a protocol or deciding on how to use a DAO treasury.
Specific Question or Problem Statement
This series of lectures will provide a general overview of the field and present some of its classical theoretical results. The lectures are free for Token Engineering students and will be open to anyone interested - as live sessions, or in recordings as part of our educational program.
Our lecturer: Assistant Professor Nimrod Talmon, PhD Ben-Gurion University, Israel
Nimrod Talmon is a tenured assistant professor in Ben-Gurion University and a consultant for technological companies in the crypto sector. His main research is in the intersection of computational social choice, combinatorial optimization, and decentralized governance in the context of decentralized autonomous organizations. He is regularly publishing in venues such as AAAI, IJCAI, and AAMAS, and serving in the program committee of these conferences. He has an Erdös number 3, Sabbath number 7, and, arguably, Bacon number 6.
Approach or Methodology
- Three sessions, 90 mins each
- Additional reading materials
- Meet and discuss with other aspiring Token Engineers
- Discuss and sharpen your understanding about:
- COMSOC general overview
- Preference aggregation and voting systems
- The governance scalability problem
**Start Date: **
Session 1: Thursday, June 23, 2022 - 3:00pm UTC
Session 2+3: September 2022, TBD
Conclusions or Key Takeaways
The final step for this program will be a workshop with various DAOs to discuss application cases and define new research questions that can lead to new research projects and TE Academy #OpenScience programs.