Dr. Evangelos Pournaras is an Associate Professor at Distributed Systems and Services group, School of Computing, University of Leeds, UK. He is also currently research fellow in blockchain industry. He has more than 5 years experience as senior scientist and postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich in Switzerland after having completed his PhD studies in 2013 at Delft University of Technology and VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Evangelos has also been a visiting researcher at EPFL in Switzerland and has industry experience at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in the USA. Since 2007, he holds a MSc with distinction in Internet Computing from University of Surrey, UK and since 2006 a BSc on Technology Education and Digital Systems from University of Piraeus, Greece. Evangelos has won the Augmented Democracy Prize, the 1st prize at ETH Policy Challenge as well as 4 paper awards and honors. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers in high impact journals and conferences and he is the founder of the EPOS, DIAS, SFINA and Smart Agora projects featured at decentralized-systems.org. He has raised significant funding and has been actively involved in EU projects such as ASSET, SoBigData and FuturICT 2.0. He has supervised several PhD and MSc thesis projects, while he designed courses in the area of data science and multi-agent systems that adopt a novel pedagogical and learning approach. Evangelos' research interest focus on distributed and intelligent social computing systems with expertise in the inter-disciplinary application domains of Smart Cities and Smart Grids.
Proof of Witness Presence: Blockchain Consensus for Augmented Democracy in Smart Cities
Smart Cities evolve into complex and pervasive urban environments with a citizens’ mandate to meet sustainable development goals. Repositioning democratic values of citizens’ choices in these complex ecosystems has turned out to be imperative in an era of social media filter bubbles, fake news and opportunities for manipulating electoral results with such means. This talk introduces a new paradigm of augmented democracy that promises citizens who actively engage in a more informed decision-making integrated to public urban space. The proposed concept is inspired by a digital revive of the Ancient Agora of Athens, an arena of public discourse, a Polis where citizens assemble to actively deliberate and collectively decide about public matters. At the core of the proposed paradigm lies the concept of proving witness presence that makes decision-making subject of providing secure evidence and testifying for choices made in the physical space. I will briefly show how proofs of witness presence can be made using blockchain consensus. I will also show how complex crowd-sensing decision-making processes can be designed with the Smart Agora platform and how real-time collective measurements can be performed in a fully decentralized and privacy-preserving way. An experimental testnet scenario on sustainable use of transport means is illustrated along with a use case on crowd-sensing cycling safety that validates evidence by the wisdom of the crowd using official data from public authorities. The paramount role of dynamic consensus, self-governance and ethically aligned artificial intelligence in the augmented democracy paradigm is outlined.