Dr. Evangelos Pournaras has been awarded the Augmented Democracy Prize for his work "Proof of Witness Presence: Blockchain Consensus for Augmented Democracy in Smart Cities”
external pageDr. Evangelos Pournaras, senior scientist at the Chair of Computational Social Science has been awarded the external pageAugmented Democracy Prize at the individuals category for his work external page"Proof of Witness Presence: Blockchain Consensus for Augmented Democracy in Smart Cities”. The competition has been the idea of the external pageProf. Cesar Hidalgo after his external pagerelated TED talk. This is Evangelos’ second award in the area of external pagedigital democracy after his team winning the 1st prize at ETH Policy Challenge.
Evangelos’ awarded work introduces a new way of participation and collective decision-making that promises citizens who actively engage in a more informed decision-making integrated in public urban space. The proposed concept is inspired by a digital revive of the Ancient Agora of Greece, 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 evidence and testifying for choices made in the physical space. In his work Evangelos shows how proofs of witness presence can be made using blockchain consensus. He also shows 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. The paramount role of dynamic consensus, self-governance and ethically aligned artificial intelligence in the augmented democracy paradigm is outlined.
