17. Bianca Trovò: Ants-Review, rethinking peer review, and blockchain

Bianca Trovò is a PhD student at Neurospin and Sorbonne Université, where she studies self-initiated movements. Recently, she is a developer of Ants-Review, a blockchain-based protocol for incentivising scientific peer review. In this conversation, we talk mainly about Ants-Review and I ask questions from the perspective of a scientist who isn't particularly familiar with blockchain and cryptography.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith. New conversations every other Friday. You can find the podcast on all podcasting platforms (e.g., Spotify, Apple/Google Podcasts, etc.).

Timestamps
0:00:10: How Ants-Review got started
0:14:07: So what's wrong with peer review (in its current form)?
0:26:14: Incentives in Ants-Review 
0:40:02: Can people cheat on  Ants-Review?
0:52:44: Will reviews on Ants-Review be many micro-reviews, rather than a few traditional reviews?
0:59:47: Why does Ants-Review need to be done in blockchain?
1:21:53: Academic articles as NFTs?
1:24:40: The future of Ants-Review 
1:35:11: How can people contribute to Ants-Review (incl. quadratic funding)?
1:41:12: How easy is it to use Ants-Review?

Ants-Review links

Podcast links

Bianca's links

Ben's links

Additional references and links
 3blue1brown video on bitcoin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4
Bianca's questions to Alexandra Elbakyan:
Q1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccqcY0YBfIw&t=1075s
Q2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccqcY0YBfIw&t=11129s
Buterin, Vitalik's blog post about quadratic funding: https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html
Game theory introduction: here is the brief and fun introduction to game theory that Bianca mentions at around the 47-minute mark: https://ncase.me/trust/

  • [This is an automated transcript with many errors]

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: [00:00:00] Yeah, so then I kind of just started doing it and, uh, still doing it. 

    Bianca Trovo: That's cool. It's rewarding. A lot of things happened during this pandemic. A lot of life changes. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Like you being in Brazil for three months longer. And 

    Bianca Trovo: my, my project also was born there, kind of, so, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: and 

    Bianca Trovo: yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Oh, okay. 

    Bianca Trovo: During this 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: pandemic.

    Uh, well, okay. I was gonna ask you anyway, like, I, I kind of wanted to have this as a fairly early question, how you started this, because maybe for context, uh, Bianca and I know each other from working in Aaron Sugar's lab. I did my masters and Bianca did, was still doing her PhD, but I don't remember you ever talking about blockchain or peer review or wanting to create a new system or stuff like that.

    So I actually was quite curious. When did, when did this happen? In somehow the last, like, we haven't [00:01:00] really talked for three years or something and 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah, I, it's, it's very new actually in the sense that, uh, I've done peer reviews during my PhD, probably not when we crossed paths in the lab, but after, um, I was invited, uh, to do peer reviews.

    So I kind of had the experience as a reviewer before having the experience of publishing papers as a PhD student. Yeah. So I kind of know the system. But then, um, in the, I would say about one year and a half ago I started getting a lot more interested in, uh, meta science. Um, so all this domain that concerns, uh, how to do science and, you know, um, open access, open science, and.

    Everything related from even just statistics and, uh, uh, how to communicate science and, and [00:02:00] so on. And, and then I, I still, I remember that, uh, in this period I was really like, uh, uh, pretty much involved into reading literature reviews about, uh, these topics and somehow also about peer reviewing and how to improve, uh, systems in academia, uh, writing papers and doing reviews.

    So reviews about how to do. A good review of papers and, and I had these ideas that were, you know, buzzing in my head, like how re a review system, a peer review system could be better. And, and somehow it happened at, at the same time. I was also, uh, I also started, um, um, watching a lot of videos by Three Blue.

    One Brown, I dunno if you know him, is, uh, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I think most people, 

    Bianca Trovo: most people, some people 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: don't know. Oh, not actually, yeah, no, I, I, I feel like [00:03:00] I've introduced. I, I tried to introduce most of the people I know to him, and most people say like, oh, whatever, math, I don't care. And then half a year later, they'll watch the videos and go, by the way, have you seen these videos with the, they're really great.

    Speaker 3: They're 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: really 

    gay. 

    Bianca Trovo: Exactly. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I told you. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah. So in the same 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: thing, so then you saw his, like, how does Bitcoin work? That kind of 

    stuff. 

    Bianca Trovo: Exactly. So that was the thing that, uh, you know, started, uh, sparkling my, sparking my interest, uh, um, distributed ledger, ledger technology and blockchain. And this was the first time in which I made the connection between peer reviews and blockchain.

    But I, I was totally disconnected from the blockchain community. I didn't know how to do it. Like, uh, how can I get my idea into something more? And so I just let it rest and, and then COVID came [00:04:00] and I had, uh, extra time to get bored. And getting bored is not something bad because, you know, the ancient Romans had a word for it.

    Like, it's like the time you spend studying not working, which is nego. So I had extra time for this tum, for this laziness. Um, and then I randomly found out about a hackathon that was going to be held in my hometown, a tour in Italy that concerned, um. Basically, you know, hackathons are these very short term competitions in which can last even just few days.

    And, and you go there with an idea and you try to develop it. And this hackathon was very specific for, um, blockchain called Ethereum, which is the probably the second [00:05:00] most, uh, known blockchain. Um, 'cause it was born after Bitcoin. And, and it was really interesting because the purpose of the hackathon was to develop, design, and develop projects with the local impact.

    So a totally different angle from what I. I had absorbed before about blockchain, which I always related to cryptocurrency. And so, you know, speculation and like, uh, yeah. Um, yeah, so I, I kind of, uh, I convinced myself to participate to this competition, although I was the only not developer there probably.

    And I was the only PhD student for sure. The only person from an academic background, not from a software engineering background, and also almost totally naive about blockchain [00:06:00] and actually probably also the only woman in the competition. And to prepare myself for the hackathon, I started, uh, studying, you know, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: so, just be before that.

    Did you, how did you take part in this, if you like? I mean, so you were later part of a team, right? But like, did you sign up as a team or did you, did, do people just go and then figure out a project or like 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah, yeah. So basically, um, I don't know about, uh, other teams. Maybe some people already knew each other.

    In my case, I, I signed up alone, uh, as a designer, let's say, and, and pretty much in this kind of hackathons, but also in general for what it concerns this, uh, tech environment that is what's related to startups. It's always good, uh, [00:07:00] balance for the organizers to have people that are more into the designing part and others that are more on the developing part.

    So it was kind of expected that some people would be, you know, uh, in charge of one side. And, and the idea was actually to meet new people there. And form groups there. The only thing that is that originally we were supposed to be in tour and physically meet with other people, but then this couldn't happen because of the pandemic.

    So the whole thing became online and I basically had few weeks before the hackathon in which I kind of developed the main concept of my project. Uh, and we had three days of hackathon. So basically in one day I had to figure out who's gonna be my partner, who's gonna help me in this? And so I started, uh, hunting [00:08:00] for developers and I found, uh, someone who really matched, uh, with me in the sense that, uh, was really into this idea and also had experience in, uh, developing some of its core aspects.

    Uh, not that I know. And so we decided, uh, to, to make a proof of concept together. And in just few days we developed a proof of concept and we wrote a first paper, let's say. So this was pretty amazing, like, uh, literally two days of no sleep because at the time I was in Brazil, I, I was stuck in Brazil and he was in London.

    So imagine we had to coordinate with this five hours of time difference and yeah. And then turns out that, uh, well we did a pretty good job. Uh, we were really proud of ourself for doing [00:09:00] such a thing in 48 hours basically. And, and at the end, we won the hackathon, we won the first place and the first prize.

    So we got super excited and we said, let's go and let's continue this project. So that's kind of how it developed. And so in the next months, we kept in touch and we continued, uh, working on aspects that were both communication, uh, building community, but also we decided to present a more formal academic paper.

    Uh, so we started writing it. And, and at the same time, uh, we also decided to apply for, uh, another program, um, a fellowship, uh, that was the first, uh, program for Web3, uh, designers and developers. Um, sponsored and funded by Bitcoin and Consensus, [00:10:00] which are two main companies in the blockchain, uh, domain.

    Kind of like the Google of the. You know, blockchain and our project, uh, got accepted and us as a team, so we had, uh, two months in which we, uh, were incubated in this, um, Web3 group of, uh, 150 people. So what is 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Web3? 

    Bianca Trovo: Okay, yeah. So basically, um, the internet that we have, uh, now it's called Web two, which follows the web one, which was the first internet.

    So the first internet was completely open to everyone. We, in a sense, it was not centralized. And then after mid 2000 with the rise of the big tech companies, uh, like Google, Facebook, basically the internet became centralized [00:11:00] and the aggregators make money on people's usage of the internet. So basically the users became the products, and the, the Web3 is the, it's the future web that people are in the blockchain are trying to, to develop.

    And the idea is that it's the centralized internet, so it's not owned, owned by specific, uh, companies. And the power is distributed among the users. So the users have, again, power on, on the content. So if you upload something, it belongs to you. Your data doesn't go to a third party. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And so, but this is still, yeah, in development, that's what people are trying to, to build.

    Bianca Trovo: Um, yeah, I mean there is something already existing, um, but it's not widely [00:12:00] used because. You still need to interact with this. Uh, there is, for example, IPFS inter proprietary file system, uh, that has this decentralized storage of data. And the cool thing is that, uh, what you put in it has, uh, is assigned a cryptographic ash.

    So basically it's like, um, a fingerprint we can say of this specific, uh, file that, uh, universally identifies it, and, and the file cannot be withdrawn. So everything that is in on the blockchain stays forever on the blockchain. You can't remove it. So it's a censorship resistant. We would say things like, you know, has happened recently with Facebook, Twitter, uh, you know, banning accounts wouldn't be possible.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. So where were, [00:13:00] what, where were you going before interrupted you? 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah, no, I was just saying that we were, um, accepted into this program and there we had really a lot of mentorship from people that are really in the blockchain, the main, and they were e even the co-founders of Ethereum and, you know, peoples who work in these different companies.

    And so we had a lot of, um, variable exchanges also with, uh, with peers, uh, the other fellows that were, were building startups and the blockchain system. Um, of course an review. This project is a bit special because it's something like meant to bridge the academia universe of people who mostly don't use, you know, crypto or blockchain.

    To a universe that is for now mostly [00:14:00] related to people in business or, um, in software development. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. Um, shall we maybe, um, I realized I haven't really structured this particularly well in terms of like introducing ants and all this kinda stuff. Uh, maybe shall we kind of from the ground up motivate what you're doing here?

    Uh, 'cause I guess we haven't really introduced what ants is, why it's necessary and what problem it solves. Um, so maybe, yeah. What's wrong with peer review? 

    Bianca Trovo: Lots of 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: things. Uh, you've got five minutes. We have to live 

    Bianca Trovo: with this. Okay. Okay. Well, um, of course I had, uh, my personal experience and, but then I started reading about it and I discovered a lot of, uh, meta science about peer reviews and a lot of comments by other researchers all converging [00:15:00] to some core ideas about why peer review is not like, uh, the most perfect system right now in the sense that, um, it's kind of biased, especially because, uh, the most common system for doing peer review is the single blind review process.

    So what happens is that, uh, when you get your paper reviewed, you don't know who the reviewer is, but the reviewer know who you are. And as simple as that, even the most professional reviewer could just, you know, read information about you and get biased about, I dunno, previous publications or your laboratory.

    And yeah, just 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: the institution, right? That's enough. 

    Bianca Trovo: The institution. Yeah. This is a lot of, um, weight. Um, and, and indeed there has been research proven that when you introduce a double blind system, you really get those biased biases [00:16:00] reduced. Um, so it's much better for, uh, minorities in science, uh, let's say women and, uh, other, uh, researchers from, uh, let's say not West, Western Europe or America.

    Um, yeah. But of course the most, uh, I think the most, uh, evident problem of peer review is just that it's too slow and people are not committed into reviewing papers for free. So I really got this feeling that when people are asked to review, they, they just do it because, I dunno, they know the editor, the editor knows them.

    They're afraid of, you know, saying no. But actually, you know, I have my own research to do. I don't wanna waste my time doing research for someone else and not getting any credit for it. Uh, and indeed it's [00:17:00]pretty, I, I found it pretty bad that, for example, when a paper is published, uh, sometimes you, the reviewers are not even acknowledged.

    Not even the anonymously, you know, it's just like, okay, the final product is there. This is the paper of the authors. But actually, there, there were people who gave extensive comments and sometimes they might even have structurally changed the paper, proposing new analysis and so on, or new literature. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, yeah.

    Even in my limited experience with peer review, I mean, so I haven't like been asked myself, but sometimes, you know, my supervisor will get something and then we'll kind of help out get to learn the sys, like how it works a bit. Right. And also give some comments and I mean, sometimes it's crazy how much you at least we think improve a paper and maybe the authors are just annoyed by stupid comments.

    But, um, I mean, sometimes you have a paper that's just, [00:18:00] that really needs to be improved. Like it's just there's some glaring problems with it. And yeah, you're right. Like all you get is you can say, you can put on your CV like you reviewed for this journal, even though basically, especially if it's like, if it's like a registered report, right?

    Where they haven't collected data yet. I feel like sometimes like I can't have done much less work than some of the co-authors like. In terms of like how much we improve this paper. Like yeah, but you get absolutely nothing for it other than like maybe the hope of some calmer or something, like someone will do this to you.

    Right. But 

    Bianca Trovo: yeah, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: that's all exactly. You, you get 

    Bianca Trovo: it is just a service to, to the community, which is okay. But on the other side, other scientific outputs are really overvalued. Like, uh, even just publishing a paper itself over, I dunno, [00:19:00] writing codes. So software. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. 

    Bianca Trovo: And, but if you think software development is just a, a core aspect of doing research, at least in, depends on the field of course, but uh, for example, in my field, you really need to program everything from the stimuli to the analysis.

    So. Just crazy that at the end, what counts is just, uh, the story that you build upon all these efforts. Right? Um, and, and yeah, so I thought we're still, uh, talking about what's the things that are wrong in peer review. So this, the biases, the lack of incentives. Um, and probably, so that's maybe just my personal idea, although I had the chance to, you know, check with other researchers.

    But I, I have this strong conviction [00:20:00] that, uh, it's the lack of incentives that makes the process slow and makes it also so hard to find reviewers. Also the fact that, uh, the selection process of reviewers kind of like top down. So it's the journal who, who has to look for people who are, you know, expert in this field.

    So this already extra time. Well, if you had like a community driven, you know, approach in which people just see the papers and they decide, oh, this is my field, my domain, uh, maybe I'm interested in, you know, I, I might review it. And, and it's kind of what happens with the preprint servers. Like you, you really see the paper and people leave comments, uh, tweet about it.

    Uh, the problem is that this has not the same value as something that goes through the. Journal system. So I [00:21:00] was wondering, we were wondering if it would be possible to create a system that basically doesn't let this value get dispersed, but uh, you know, can extract it and channel it in a way that it's also not just authors can benefit from, from it, but also the reviewers themself and create a sort of a virtuous, uh, circle, a gamified system in which everyone, you know, is, um, motivated to do what they're right now naturally supposed to do.

    And, and at the same time, uh, right, because they are incentivized, they would do it, you know, for, for the best outcome that is also in a certain way, uh, through a good behavior. So without cheating, without trying to, you know. To get shortcut because, uh, it's very rare, [00:22:00] but it's still a feeling that, um, both authors and reviewers have displayed, um, like, uh, misbehavior in the field.

    So like, authors might try to, to get the review passed by, you know, falsifying data, uh, results or there, there have been even cases of authors that were the reviewers themself, like they, oh 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: wait, I heard, yeah. Heard of some cases. Yeah. 

    Bianca Trovo: Uh, but mostly of course, the case is what you, we, we hear in pop science culture, you know that there is this terrible reviewer too that is just gonna destroy your paper, make you feel really bad about your work, and you have to redo your paper all over again, thousands of times.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, what I, what I found, yeah, the quality of peer review is something that in my [00:23:00] still limited experience, I've also found really weird. I mean, there was, you know, some paper where it wasn't like we reviewed it, it wasn't a bad paper, but it, um, clearly some stuff needed to be changed. It's fairly obvious, not in terms of like we, they should do an experiment or anything like that, but just like what they presented, some of that had to be changed and.

    Again, it's not the bad paper and I, I think we probably suggested that it should be accepted or something, but like, you know, you have to make like some not big changes, but like some of the interpretation was just way out of line. Yeah. Just a few things that were really weren't that great. And then, you know, we see like, I think we, we might have been reviewer to, uh, but then like review one or something just wrote like, this looks great.

    I look forward to this being published or something. It's like, did you even read the paper? Like, like, this is not great. Like it's objectively not great. How can you, and has happened a few [00:24:00] times now that I've seen it, that if you have two or three reviewers, there's often one review who seems to have barely read the paper at all.

    Speaker 3: Mm-hmm. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And just write something like, oh yeah, this is okay. And then it's like, come on man. I put like five hours into this and found like so many problems that they can fix and that improves the paper. And then other people just seem to. Just say, yep, looks good. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah, that's, that's why we were also thinking maybe, uh, there should be a system that also review the reviewers.

    You know, it's the, this problem of, of who watch, who watches the watchers. If it was on a community basis and publicly accessible to all researchers. Imagine you would have the papers, the reviewers, uh, the views and, and people could just, you know, decide where to jump in. And, and of course on the incentivization side, this would be [00:25:00] solved.

    But then how do you protect from, you know, uh, other kind of behaviors like, uh, people who try to cheat to get. Uh, things published faster or in the way they want. So that's where the idea of privacy comes. And so we would like to have a system that is at the same time, you know, double blind, but you, uh, everyone's identity is, um, you know, accountable.

    So everyone is accountable in the system. So it's not a, it's anonymous, but not in a way that you can't really, uh, like track down who was the author of, uh, this review or not, you know? 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Um, I have a few points or questions about anonymity. Uh, should we [00:26:00] talk about that in a second? About anonymity an anon.

    Okay, so I have a few, yeah, I just have a few questions there. Um, shall we just pause that for a second and we'll get there in like a few minutes? I'd like to just go over some of the like basics. Actually, one thing that you said about reviewing the reviewers. So I like the idea of that, and in some cases I think that's fairly easy to do.

    Like, you know, if someone says like, look, here are all these flaws and the obvious flaws, and another review just doesn't see them and just says, looks good, then it's very easy to say, look, this person didn't pay attention or whatever. Like, it seems to me like the, if someone just, you know, if you have a review that's too two sentences long, it's very easy to show that that's not a good review in most cases.

    But I'm just curious, do you think people are actually gonna review the reviews? Because I feel like it's just like, that's just gonna add. More [00:27:00] time and effort for everyone. Right. Um, I don't know, when I read that, I thought like, it's a nice idea. I just can't see anyone wanting to do it unless that is also incentivized.

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. So it is also incentivized. So the idea would be that, uh, anyway, all these transactions happen in, um, in this platform that is called an review and which is both a bounty and a, a pool for, uh, tokens. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: What does that mean? 

    Bianca Trovo: Um, so just to explain, um, so a bounty is a, it's a very common system, uh, for, uh, software developers.

    Basically, it's like a price that, uh, companies can give to solve a specific issue, a bug or, or even something bigger in, uh, in a program or in a system. So basically the idea is that when an author [00:28:00] uploads, uh, the paper, uh, he can set up, uh, a reward, right? Which has a price in the, in the native, uh, token of, uh, and review.

    The idea is that though this, uh, this value, this monetary reward is hidden, uh, such that people are not incentivized to do this specific review, or another one just because of the, of the money. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So you don't say like, I'm gonna do this review and then get that amount of tokens or whatever 

    Bianca Trovo: you, you're just gonna do the review because, you know, this is your field, uh, this is your, you know, field of expertise, of competence.

    Uh, you don't know how much you're gonna get. The idea is that the reward, it's both monetary and reputation. So this is something we still have to work on. So we haven't implemented yet. It's still on design. [00:29:00] Uh, right now we only have implemented in a minimum viable product, uh, this token ads that you can withdraw when once the peer review is accepted, uh, by, by the community, let's say.

    But basically everyone, also the validators of the peer reviews can have this reward for doing 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: mm-hmm. 

    Bianca Trovo: Because anyway, each transaction is gonna cost some gas. And, and then you can have some, some reward for what you, what you do in the system. Beside that, we also introduced this idea of a pool in the sense that, uh, basically the community could be the one that provides, let's say, the money.

    And in a, in a sense it's like a sort of exchange, right? You have this, uh, this token that are, uh, stake, uh, staken, uh, take, uh, sorry, [00:30:00] uh, um, the tokens that are put on stake and, and then can be used. And the more you keep the tokens, the, the more the value increases over time. So basically it es interest. So this one of ideas that we thought about, and in this way, it's kind of like ev it's gonna be everyone's turn at some point to have the paper review.

    To do review. Or the review of the review. So everyone gets something. Of course. Uh, you cannot imagine to have like 1000 people doing a review. So what's gonna happen Yeah. Is, uh, it's that, uh, basically the, the reward is gonna give to the best reviews. And, and for this, we were imagining something like a voting system, an up down voting system in which people will evaluate, okay, this is for me the best review.

    And if [00:31:00] they, let's say they voted the best one, then they're also gonna have some incentives, incentives from it so they can take shares from, from the reward of the review. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. So I have a few questions about tokens also. So one thing that wasn't quite clear to me is, so let's say I, I write a review, um, and let's say it's very good and I get the reward for it.

    What tokens do I get? It wasn't clear to me, do I get ants like your own tokens or do I get e What exactly do I get here? 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. So this is something still in development for now, we only have ants because we, our platform is still on testnet. We, we don't have it on the main, uh, on chain, let's say. But the idea is that this, uh, token is kind of like we are gonna have a token that is for [00:32:00] the reputation, which could be ants, and then we could have a monetary reward in a regular cryptocurrency, for example, either or die or whatsoever.

    We, we haven't clarified yet, uh, in the sense that we haven't really implemented. But, uh, this is one option. Uh, otherwise another option would be that ans itself. Becomes a token that is exchangeable with other cryptocurrency. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. That was gonna be like this. I mean, the, the reason I asked this question is also is whether this is supposed to be a system that's contained in itself in terms of there's a certain amount of, um, you know, you can, you can review stuff and then you get this tokens and then you can use it so people review your stuff.

    Um, and, but it all stays within the system. Or whether this is supposed to be something that, you know Yeah. Relates to a regular cryptocurrency like Ethereum or something like that. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah, no, we [00:33:00] weren't thinking of something totally closed. So in a way we're thinking of some of a system that is actually open to, to other cryptocurrencies, but who knows, maybe to fiat currencies.

    Um, the idea would be that, uh, ans review is, um, modular platform. So we were also thinking about, uh, the platform being a sort of integration to other possible applications. For example, uh, could be also like, uh, something that integrates already existing journals, uh, without having some open access journals.

    Uh, we're also considering having an open access journal for that, but, uh, for now we are, you know, just keeping to the peer review. But yeah, basically it could be something very valuable for this. Uh, basically this process that is before the final acceptance [00:34:00] of a paper in, in a journal. Uh, so it could really integrate well with the preprint services and this preview that can happen in between, which is now called prayer review.

    So basically I review that it's, you know, the coupled from. The classical journal systems. So it doesn't really happen in the process of, uh, submission of the paper, but it happens before and it's transferable and, mm-hmm. Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. So I mean, one reason I was also asking about whether this is a closed system or ator, other cryptocurrencies or non cryptocurrencies, um, is, so one thing that, and maybe I'm just misunderstanding something here, but one problem I saw is that I felt like if not done very carefully, this let's say like in, in a few years, like the system is accepted and, um, [00:35:00] everyone's using it.

    Let's say, it seemed to me like it might very likely increase inequality in the system, in the scientific system because you could have rich labs from, you know, that are well funded. That could then s. Put very high incentives on their reviews. So then everyone wants to review those papers because if you manage to get one, you get more money.

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Which then means that kind of own, like the rich labs get the good peer review. 

    Bianca Trovo: Mm-hmm. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And the, the poor labs get, not necessarily bad peer review, but not quite as many people are trying to really put the best effort into it. And also then in addition to that, you also have the thing that if you can just, if you can buy whatever token you use that you give as a bounty for reviewing your paper.

    If you are rich, you might never have an incentive to actually write a peer review because you can just buy them from your [00:36:00] lab funds. Whereas other labs might have to do lots of peer review before they can actually, before they have enough tokens, that they can have one of their own papers peer reviewed.

    Bianca Trovo: Hmm. So, um, this thing connects kind of to what I, uh, briefly mentioned before to the privacy. So basically that's why we want to have not only the identities of the agents in the system, but also the transactions private. In order to do that, uh, we would like to introduce a cryptographic, uh, method that is called zero Knowledge Proof, which is basically, um, a method that, uh, guarantees you the validity of a statement, uh, without actually revealing what the statement is about.

    So basically. Uh, if you have the, the classic example of Alice and Bob of the alter and the peer review, [00:37:00] you get, uh, the peer review, uh, uploaded and, and also the, let's say the monetary value of it. And, and the only thing that, uh, the, the receiver will know from, from the sender is that, okay, this is, this has the, a specific value, but you don't know how much.

    Speaker 3: Mm-hmm. 

    Bianca Trovo: So basically it's kind of like a sort of permutation. This, uh, cryptographic system worked with the upper mutation algorithm that, uh, basically, uh, it's secure in terms of, let's say A is a, but, uh, the people don't know that this is about A and not b. They just know the identity of two items, let's say.

    And this is already implemented by some companies. And, and basically the idea is that, uh, [00:38:00] the, the tokens would be wrapped with this, uh, zero knowledge proof. So instead of ants, it would have decades ends. So the only thing you know is that you're gonna get something, but you don't know how much. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But why would I do it if I dunno how much I'm gonna get if I, let's say there's like this paper that, I mean, of course I want to give back to the community and some, you know, sometimes you also like, uh.

    Some reviews that here we've gotten, that we've done have been because we thought the paper looked interesting. Right? Like, that's definitely the case. But it seems to me if, if, if a large bonus of an answer review is that it's incentivized, I'd like to know how much I'm gonna get because I don't wanna put all this effort and then get like, you know, 10 cents or something.

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. But, uh, that's, that's where the community comes in in the sense that, anyway, the reward is gonna be proportional to your efforts, right? So the more efforts you do, uh, the better the quality of your [00:39:00] review, uh, the more, uh, your reputation is gonna be, uh, on stake. And also the reward. There is an initial, there is an initial, let's say, bounty that is associated to the review.

    But in a sense, people are also gonna bet. On the, on the quality of the reviews. So this is also gonna increase the value. I see. So the So you 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: get, okay. Yeah. 

    Bianca Trovo: You have like these validators of the reviews themself of the peer reviews that are gonna say, oh, I think this one is really good. I want to, you know, put my tokens there and, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: okay.

    I see. So yeah, the, the initial bounty you get or might get is only part of the compensation you get. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: For doing the, okay then this leads to the next problem. 

    Bianca Trovo: Okay. So many problems, I suppose I propose a solution. [00:40:00] 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: No, no. I mean this is also, um. Maybe it is, right? Like maybe you have, it is just like, so this is actually something that my father said.

    I, I briefly mentioned I was gonna do this interview. Your father. Okay. Yeah. What this was about. So he used to work as a software developer and he said that, uh, I mean this isn't like a blockchain problem or anything, but he said basically they used to have this like system at the company he worked for, where they had this like online forum where people could, you know, write posts and questions.

    And it was kind of, I guess like an internal stack overflow or something like that. Mm-hmm. I dunno. Um, something along those lines. And what he said was that they stopped it pretty quickly because they, he worked for a very big company. A very big company, and they ended up with these like circles of people who just ended up upvoting each other's comments.

    So someone would just like write I agree. And would get like 4,000 up votes or something. 

    Speaker 3: Mm-hmm. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And then it [00:41:00] looked like this person had made a great comment. Even though they hadn't said anything. So then this leads to the kind of question of if your reputation depends on how many people up vote you, how can you, it seems like this system could fail to easily be abused, right?

    I mean, I guess you say okay, it might be anonymous, right? So therefore it's hard to know. But I dunno, I wonder like how anonymous it is and whether it's not possible to have people basically Yeah. Just give, give fake feedback that helps each other out or something like that. Right. 

    Bianca Trovo: Basically cheating.

    Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Kind of. But in a way, like for each other? Yeah. In a, I dunno, is that solved by anonymity or, 

    Bianca Trovo: uh, we think it is in the sense that, uh, you know, you are not gonna see the names of the people. You're gonna see these public keys. Uh, which are this, you know, ash of numbers. And it's true that even in right [00:42:00] now in, uh, on Ethereum, because it's uh, it's a public, uh, blockchain, you see all the, all the transaction publicly.

    So if you browse on net scan and you know that this specific address belongs to this person, you can know, basically you have access to their bank account, their blockchain account, so you know how much they spend on what, and, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: but especially in science, if you have this, such a small world, right, you very quickly get into situational where it's probably, especially if you have like a small field, fairly easy to figure out who's who, right?

    Bianca Trovo: Well, yeah. Yes and no in the sense that, uh, I still imagine that you, if you have a platform with lots of, you know, cryptographic ashes. I, I wouldn't really know exactly with the a hundred percent, uh, certainty that this is banned and not someone else working more or less in the field also. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Sorry. But like if the plan is to kind [00:43:00] of, I say, okay, you and I, we say, you know what?

    We should, we should make some money. Yeah. Money with this platform. Right. Then I just give you my hash and you give me your Yeah. And then 

    Bianca Trovo: yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Problem solve, right? Like it's, it's not, 

    Bianca Trovo: yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I dunno. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah, this could be a problem, but still. Um, so that's why we wanted to introduce the general knowledge proof and a Homo homomorphic encryption in order to have this, you know, um.

    Higher level of security on the, on the problem of ter uh, addresses. But I also imagine that, uh, in terms of scale, it's gonna be really hard to, like, even if you and me decide, okay, let's vote each other, it's gonna be just one vote against many other people. So the system is meant to be resistant to the so-called civil attack, which is this, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: uh, what attack, 

    Bianca Trovo: uh, civil attack, [00:44:00] uh, in computer science.

    A civil attack is basically when you try to multiply your identities to take profit. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Ah, okay. Yeah. 

    Bianca Trovo: Um, so I just opened several accounts and with different names, and then I would just vote myself. For example, this is a civil ca uh, attack. And so this wouldn't be possible, uh, in the platform. Already. For example, in our MVP, even if you try, you can't be the reviewer and the author at the same time.

    So one of our, um, let's say user, let's say more like, um, early, uh, ux, uh, design, let's say, uh, users, uh, try to do that. And it was like, oh, I can't do my review, of course, because you just uploaded the paper so you can't review it on your own because, um, basically when you, once you put the, the file, it's stored in IPFS [00:45:00]and, and the system knows that, uh, you are this person and, and you can't do the same thing twice.

    So from this point of view, uh, that's the good thing of blockchain because it's really, it's the security and that's the thing why people really. Are really moving towards it. So it's not just the incentive, but also the security on the human side. Of course, this cannot, I, I always think that even if you have the highest, you know, tech most perfect technology, you're always gonna find a way to cheat in the system.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, of course. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. And this, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: but the thing is, in this case, it's kind of really useful though to do it right? Because in this case it's with fairly little effort, you know, us just telling each other what our hashes are and then up voting each other's reviews. You know, if this becomes a [00:46:00] standard thing, then it's quite lucrative, I'd imagine financially.

    Bianca Trovo: Um, yes. But, uh, well, uh, I don't know. It's kind of. It's really kind of like a game theory problem. And, and for example, um, I dunno if, you know, uh, there is a nice simulation online made by this developer, uh, I think it's called, uh, they are called Nick Nikki. Uh, I, I need to find it. It's really fun. Basically you can play with game theory with different characters and you can be the bad guy or like, uh, the cooperative one, or the copycat, basically someone who copies.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I know what you mean. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I'll, I'll put a link to that in the description. I'll, I'll find it. I it somewhere. Yeah. 

    Bianca Trovo: Um, I, I cannot type right now, otherwise I would look for the name. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. No, I, I, I, I have it like in my, in the description of the podcast, I always have references and links and stuff, so I'll put it 

    Bianca Trovo: there.

    Okay. [00:47:00] And basically when you do the simulation, you play the game. You see that in the long term, bad behavior is not promoted. So only in the short term, you really have an advantage of, uh, being, you know, the speculator in a sense. Uh, it's always a mix between cooperation and, let's say, uh, more egoistic behavior.

    And, and you can really see that, uh, in the long term it's kind of like more, um, profitable to have this. Collaborative approach. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, so I mean, I, so yes and no. So I mean, whether cooperation or defection pays off really depends on the environment. So if you are, so let's take the example of the Iterator prison dilemma in that game.

    If you have a population that consists entirely of people who [00:48:00] cooperate all the time 

    Speaker 3: mm-hmm. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Then it pays off maximally to defect every single time because you know, the others are gonna cooperate over time. Yeah. But for example, if you play against other people who play, for example, tit for tat or win sail, it shift, then cooperating pays off more in the long run.

    Now the only, I guess the one reason also why I'm interested in blockchain is because, you know, I, my work is also about game theory and then blockchain. There's a lot about game theory in that. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. Because it's mechanism design. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Exactly. And that's, so that's basically what I want to get at now is that in a way where the corporation defect.

    It's profitable, depends on how you set up the system. And I guess my question is whether you can set yours up in a way that allows, or that leads to defection not being profitable anymore. Whereas in the very, in the example of my father's company thing, or the company my father worked in, it's not his company.

    In that case, the environment was set up. So defection did pay [00:49:00] off quite a well. So to me it seems that it really depends on how you set up the thing. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. So I think for that, uh, we would need to, to do a research aside just to, to, to study the effects of, uh, of adding this rewarding aspect in the system.

    Because just by, you know. I can have my personal hypothesis about it, but, uh, I dunno if the data would correspond to reality, um, maybe would need to run simulations about that. Um, but in general, I think that, uh, if you consider the specific environment of scientific research is not like you're opening the system to, to everyone.

    Uh, people care about having good science, right? Because that's the reason they're working for. So I don't, [00:50:00] of course this is pretty much specula, uh, you know, speculation. Um, speculative, not in that sense, but in the sense, you know, it's just theoretical. Yeah, 

    Speaker 3: yeah, yeah. 

    Bianca Trovo: Um, but, uh, of course we must consider that, uh, these are just marginal cases.

    The ones that are gonna be cheating all the time in order to. To look right from the system. And even that, uh, I would, uh, it would be really odd if the community, you know, the other agents in the system don't realize it. So, so, yeah, I, I can't really, uh, you know, uh, be super certain about that because we, we haven't really started a pilot in which we had, uh, actual researchers using the platform, but only few users by themselves.

    So there was no, it was, the complexity was smaller, but, [00:51:00] um. I, I've seen other experiments like that, um, for peer reviewing in, uh, web tool, web tool, let's say platforms without, uh, reward, uh, monetary reward where the reward was actually, you know, um, uh, for example having some badge or like, uh, some position on the website.

    A sort of, uh, impact internal impact factor. And my impression was more like that, uh, people would try to do as many reviews as possible to increase the quantity. And I dunno if this, uh, system, uh, evaluate the quality. But I think when you put the quality on stake, this is an important factor that might, uh, you know, um, dis encourage dishonest behavior because, uh, unless you have only.

    [00:52:00] Good friends that vote for each other's perfect reviews or papers. There's always gonna be things to be improved, right? And if I am an external researcher and I see, oh, these people are voting this paper, this review, which is really bad, I'm not gonna let them do it. So I think there's gonna be some networking, networking effect for which other scientists would gather up and say, Nope, this is not, this is not good.

    And, and kind of like what happens on Twitter, right? When you see people posting stuff and other people not agreeing with that, I think it would be more or less like this. And, and also there is another thing that, uh, we think it might happen when you shift from this top down perspective to this bottom up.

    One is that, uh, if you have many people engaged into this process, [00:53:00] kind of like, um, you know, on a Twitter community or like, uh, on a GitHub repository where you have, you know, an issue to solve, people maybe will not, uh, engage, you know, like, uh, all their efforts into one single long review. But maybe the, the system itself will, uh, uh, promote micro contributions.

    So people will have, you know, this, uh, let's say this power of the review where one and two would be dispersing to many people contributed to the work. And I guess also the, the perception of the gain would be different. So, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, I mean that's, yeah, that's interesting. I never, I always thought of it as. The classic, you have two or three reviewers or, I mean, in this case you'd have many reviewers, but only a few of them get, but everyone reviews the entire paper and gets judged according to that.

    But [00:54:00] I guess it is also an option that you have really just, well, let's say, I mean obviously won't work like this, but let's say you have a Word document and people can make a comment on that, right? Then someone could comment like, Hey, you have a typo here, as a very stupid example. But then people would say like, oh yeah, you do have a comment.

    You have a, you do have a typo there. And then they can up upload that, that comment, for example, I guess that almost makes, hmm, almost makes more sense to me than, you know, taking the old thing of people reviewing the entire paper and just putting that in a blockchain, uh, but actually also changing the way that review is actually done.

    Um, I guess you'd still need like these big meta commentaries like your overall conclusion. Doesn't follow from the results or whatever. Right. But I guess it is interesting to actually reconsider how you, what, what a review even is in that 

    Bianca Trovo: sense. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, 

    Bianca Trovo: yeah. In fact, that's, that kind [00:55:00] of goes back to the, even to the concept behind the, the name of once review.

    Um, because it, it evokes this idea of having a colony of ants, um, which is an emergent, uh, you know, organism, um, among all the parts. So in a way you could see like, uh, the finite product of the paper as this, uh, emergent, uh, entity that comes from all these micro contributions. It could be from your lab, could be from the external reviewers, but in a sense there are several people working on that also.

    It's interesting, for example, in, uh, the peer review, uh, among the peer review, the recent peer review proposals, there is this one of automatizing, the, let's say, the superficial editing of the review, uh, with ai, uh, which could take care [00:56:00] of, you know, the language aspects, even the statistics. Um, so the, such that the reviewer could concentrate only on the content, uh, on the science itself.

    But still, yeah, there is a debate about how review could be changed. Uh, if we can create a new standard for. For doing a peer review. And I think in the sense, uh, an review kind of, you know, goes in this direction. Uh, of course for now, um, I dunno if you have had chance to take a look to the MVP, but, uh, we have this traditional, okay, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: sorry.

    MVP means 

    Bianca Trovo: what? Uh, minimum viable product. Yeah, yeah. Basically we have this, uh, we have our legal application. I, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: so I, this is, 

    Bianca Trovo: you need a crypto wallet in order to operate 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: in it. I was about to say, that's wallet to actually use a thing. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I've, I've seen the video, but I haven't, I don't [00:57:00] have, uh, uh, a crypto wallet.

    Yeah. I mean I actually do have one now, but I haven't connected it to my laptop and that kinda stuff, so 

    Bianca Trovo: yeah. Anyway, now it would be a bit expensive maybe to do the transaction even just to try. But anyway, you see that, uh, for now we have just this simple thing of we upload. A document, so it's gonna be like the whole review, but, uh, did, yes.

    To evolve towards this micro contributions maybe and having more people involved in the process. Um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. Yeah. But it's funny, once you mentioned the idea of letting some AI do that, that's gonna be the next money maker then, isn't it? 

    Bianca Trovo: Mm. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Having an AI that finds like every discrepancy in a favor, like statistical discrepancies and all these things, and then you get money for each of the comments.

    Bianca Trovo: You mean that AI gets the money? What, what? 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean No, no, no. You like, so if you think like [00:58:00] big picture it. I mean, I dunno how hard this is, but in some cases at least it will pay off more to write an algorithm that finds the errors and then almost automatically implements them rather than to find the errors yourself.

    Right. Because then every time you can just, every paper basically, you can let that algorithm run over. Yeah. And you can get, but then again, I guess that is a great contribution if you have something 

    Bianca Trovo: that finds I, yeah. I wouldn't be so scared of it actually. I think it would be a lot of, uh, you know, less time wasted because, uh, sometimes reviewers have to waste time just doing the editing of a paper because some paper are just delivered, you know, like really raw drafts, because again, due to this published parish culture, people just want to, to submit something even not finished.

    Once I review the paper, that was totally not finished and. Really, like, I couldn't, [00:59:00] sometimes I couldn't understand like, uh, there were parts repeated, you know, it really looked like an early stage work and yeah. So, but I guess the point, like what's the value of a human researcher that, uh, for now a machine can't provide is actually the, the whole core science in the work, like the scientific hypothesis and the, the coherence among the argumentations that you're probably when they even, I don't know, GP three will be able to do that.

    I know, but for now we need humans to, to do peer reviews 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: for now. Yeah. So one general question I have is about whether, whether ants reviews needs to be on a blockchain or not. So. I mean, again, as I said in the beginning, [01:00:00] I have about two weeks of reading about blockchain and these kind of things. And so I think one way of thinking about it is just that it, it's a tool like almost anything else.

    And the tool has a specific purpose and advantages and disadvantages. I mean, I just looked up like what are some advantages, disadvantages of blockchains? And it wasn't immediately clear why answer view should be done via blockchain and not via a private company that has its internal database. Yeah. Do you maybe want to just, I dunno whether you have a answer to that or I can address specific advantages or disadvantages?

    Um, 

    Bianca Trovo: I mean, in general, uh, if you, if you think in terms of, uh, security and openness, I think we think that blockchain is the best tool because it guarantees you decentralization. Well, if you have data that, uh, again, it's [01:01:00] aggregated in a company, we are creating Facebook again, so, or Google, so you, you can put all your scientific, uh, output there and Google or Facebook or, okay, let's not mention them, but private company one day just decides to change the terms or, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: but couldn't you set that up as like a, let's say a nonprofit organization that has, I dunno, like how you could, I mean, I dunno set that up.

    That, that it's not like someone can just decide to delete all the data or whatever. Right. I dunno. It just seems to me like it, it could be possible to do a lot of what you want to do with ans review. 

    Bianca Trovo: Mm-hmm. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But without, I mean, so one, you know, like, do we really need the entire distributed network, for example, to.

    Store and verify every single comment and every like, and all these kind of things, right? Like it's, it's very inefficient in a way. It [01:02:00] seems to me sometimes that like not, yeah, I, I think the main problem I had was just with the efficiency of the system. 

    Speaker 3: Mm-hmm. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And I unders, I think I can see how for something, like if you want to replace a bank, how that's important, but with peer review it, I don't know.

    It wasn't quite, 

    Bianca Trovo: no, I mean, of course, but, uh, depends what you take in, in the, in the picture, right? Because if you think of journals for example, they make billions, they make a lot of money from this, uh, from being the intermediaries between, you know, people providing a service to the scientific community and people receiving it like.

    Citizens and taxpayers. So even if you have some systems that are, you know, totally nonprofit, what's the scale of this nonprofit? Because there are always gonna be some, you know, private, [01:03:00] uh, let's say sources, even in, uh, big nonprofits projects. Where do you get the money? Like, uh, usually it's either taxes from contributors and so you have, you can have these big grants, but this, we are talking about funding.

    Right. But when it comes to hosting on platforms, uh, I dunno, it doesn't come to my mind a specific completely public, uh, system that, uh, it's not, uh, correctable. Maybe CER has tried something like that. It could be considered like, uh, you know, it's made by scientists and it has public funding, but I think whenever you work with the private companies and we do journals, there's always gonna be profit.

    Otherwise, how can they sustain themselves? 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: [01:04:00] Well, but it's, so one thing, maybe this is the same thing, I don't know, but it still seems to me to be different or, Hmm. I mean, so let's say for example, bank, right? You, you, you place money in a bank because you trust them to keep it. And that if you want to transfer it to someone else, they can guarantee that that happens, that the other person gets the money.

    But to me, I don't know. A journal makes its money mostly off. I mean, mostly of unpaid labor, but um, mostly off its reputation. I wonder whether that's the same thing as the trust we hold in a bank. 

    Bianca Trovo: I mean, journals right now make most of their money because the journals are not open access. I mean, the articles are not open access, so to access them, you need to pay.

    And even more, if you want to publish them open access, you have to pay [01:05:00] much more now. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. 

    Bianca Trovo: So basically the people who are producing the science are not getting any money. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Yeah. I, I understand. Um, and I completely agree that it makes no sense for Elsevier to earn that much money from what they do.

    It's just somehow, it seems to me that. Like, for example, you mentioned security as an advantage for of blockchain. 

    Bianca Trovo: Mm-hmm. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But what exactly is the fear here? Like that someone would hack into Elsevier and write new reviews for papers? 

    Bianca Trovo: Some people have already done that. Not specifically to Elsevier, but, uh, yeah, I don't want to name a specific journal, but I have read actually that, uh, both this, um, you know, conference, uh, systems that are used mostly for computer science, like Easy Chair, uh, you know, it's like [01:06:00] you upload your paper and then they have no, not is chair specifically, but in general they're very vulnerable.

    Uh, but also journals like, uh, they don't really check the identity of people. Like you could have a fake email and, and enter the system as, as a reviewer of your own paper. This has already happened. Of course, it's not like on a huge scale. So in this sense, yeah, the security wouldn't be the biggest threat.

    Be threat because it's not like we are talking about sensible data. Right? 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. You're not, yeah. You're talking about peer review, not the 

    Bianca Trovo: data. So we are talking about the scientific output, but still there is this thing, I dunno, let's imagine any hypothetical scenario where, I don't know, the companies, the behind the journal fails, or did they just decide to take off all the articles and you have [01:07:00] no access anymore to, to the science like or to the reviews or, there is always this limit, this, you know.

    Um, this vulnerability that okay, we don't maybe see much in, um, right now in academic publishing, although actually most of the researchers that I know, and especially in third world countries, have been massively relying on Cy Hub for accessing science. So this might mean something if you really need a pirate, uh, system to, to read paper.

    So why is that? If the system was perfectly optimized right now, we wouldn't need to leverage on that. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, no, I mean, I, I'm not, yeah, I'm not suggesting that the way it's run right now is the optimal way. I was just, um, 

    Bianca Trovo: yeah, but that, that's, do 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: you see what 

    Bianca Trovo: I mean? Like it's not Yeah, I understood your point, [01:08:00] but it also goes back to, so that's the thing.

    Um, the, for example, the motive of blockchain is trust. Uh, don't trust, verify. I think the, this model is really scientific, in its core, is basically on the basis of science. Actually, if you think about it, the motto of the, of the Royal society was, uh, Nu Inverb. Like, uh, okay. Um, basically you shouldn't take for granted, uh, anything from other people, words without, you know, verifying.

    And, and every time you have intermediate risk in a system, you are basically giving your trust to them. And, and they're powerful because basically, whatever they do, you have no control. Basically, you outsource your, you know, your value to someone who's [01:09:00] gonna be the custodian of this. So that's the main.

    The main motivation probably for which wa for which people are, um, moving towards blockchain. Of course, maybe it's more evident when you are talking about banks, especially for countries where, you know, there is a lot of inflation and monies unstable. This is super evident when, when the politics interferes with the, with economics and, uh, a bank, uh, basically system collapses.

    You, you lose the money is like, you know, all the value goes down. And, and if you translate this same problem too, I don't know, science, it could basically be the same like from one day to the other could happen actually. That's kind of what happened so far. Like some publishing companies basically prohibited access to some [01:10:00] universities because they were, you know, not agreeing with system.

    Of, uh, paying high fees or not, not to talk about all the cases on court. For example, you, you must know about Aaron Schwartz, um, who is, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: um, 

    Bianca Trovo: yes, pioneer of open access and also, um, he worked on lots of projects and he, he committed, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: so is he the guy who uploaded lots of papers and then Yeah. Committed suicide?

    Yeah, yeah, 

    Bianca Trovo: yeah. And he was, uh, charged of I think 35 years of prison and I don't know how many millions to pay. And, and the papers were already out of copyright since many years because they were very old and they came from the ac an academic service, uh, you know, um, internal. So it's not that he hacked.

    The, the system [01:11:00] somehow it was like, you know, I have access to this university. I'm taking the papers and putting somewhere else. So this is kind of weird. It's kind of creepy actually. Like the power that, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, no, I mean, again, I'm not, I'm not, um, trying to defend the way that journals make profit. I think my, my question is maybe more towards, because you're not suggesting really, I mean, you said maybe this could be linked to a journal or whatever.

    Right. But right now it's just about peer review and it, the peer review is, I mean there's lot, lots that can be improved there. 

    Speaker 3: Mm-hmm. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Is it the speed especially, but most of the things you just mentioned, it doesn't seem to me that that's something you're trying to solve with ans though, right? Like you're not, you are, it's, it's part of the same ecosystem that tries to change how we, um, communicate science and findings.

    But it doesn't seem to me that. Or, or are you saying, [01:12:00] because you have to upload your manuscript into and for people to be able to review it that guarantees that papers can always be read. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah, so I mean, it's kind of, uh, in interconnected in the sense that, uh, the value that the Jordan, you were talking about the prestige, right?

    But who is giving the prestige to a journal is the fact that it gathers probably a specific Jordan gathers, you know, the best researchers in the field and also provides the best peer reviews. I think if you, if you look to high impact factor journals, they're not gonna give you like sloppy reviews. They, they're gonna have many checks.

    Um, 

    Speaker 3: yeah, 

    Bianca Trovo: I dunno, I didn't have a specific experience about that, but, uh, the whole value, [01:13:00] it's around the validation. It's kind of like the peer review is, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I thought, do you really think that? I always thought that it was more that the, for some reason, whatever it might be, um, some journal gets a reputation and then more people submit good papers.

    I mean, like the, an example would be like, I feel like, um, if I were to be editor in Chief of Nature mm-hmm. Uh, or in responsible of the physics section or whatever, like something I don't understand anything about and I just picked articles at random, they'd pro they'd probably be pretty good. Like the, the quality of the articles published would probably still be pretty good just because people submit their best work there.

    Um, I'm not saying that they don't add good peer review, but I feel like it, they're there. It's more like you just have for whatever reason, this reputation and based on that, people send different quality work to journals. Um, 

    Bianca Trovo: yeah, yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Maybe that's wrong. 

    Bianca Trovo: No, the, there is totally this aspect, [01:14:00] but uh, we also agree that uh, a paper that is not peer reviewed doesn't have the same value.

    So you can have any potential nature around there. And if it's still on bio archive, people are not gonna notice it as much as when it's on nature. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. It gets like a final stamp. 

    Bianca Trovo: So the peer review is really this validation that it's kind of correspondent to the blockchain validation of a block. Like until a block is not validated, the people, you know, there is not this, um, consensus of the community that this is the valid track.

    So you can have multiple. Change, but only the one that is validated by the community is the one that is gonna have valuable transactions. And if you transfer this metaphor also in the scientific field, I think it's kind of like that. Um, COVID probably changed a [01:15:00] bit scenario because there was this, uh, necessity Yeah.

    Of having papers and scientific outputs faster. So people started relying on preprints. But normally, uh, preprints have an internal value, like people retweet them, comment them. But until they have this final stamp of it's peer reviewed, accepted by a journal is not the same thing. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: It's interesting. I never, I mean, I, I haven't aware that people's attitudes of preprints have changed during COVID, but it's, yeah, I mean, like, it's, it's a, you know, I, I spent uh, uh, we did a paper on COVID, um, and it's a preprint still, it would be a paper ready if I finished it right now, it's still a Preprint.[01:16:00] 

    Um, uh, yeah. And that like, because it's on like risk perception about getting COVID and that kinda stuff. It got cited like 40 times since it appeared last year and it's still a Preprint, right? It's still like a four page preprint and people somehow, um, I don't know, trust it more, I dunno. Yeah. It is this weird thing where in any other, any other Preprint, not any other.

    Um, but like most, I feel like any other Preprint, I will, I, let's say I write, it's not, it's not gonna get 40 citations in a year. Um. Yeah, partly based off what you said, like people, 

    Bianca Trovo: I mean, I, I also totally agree with you that there is also a sort of filter preselection due to the prestige of the journal, but we created that It's not that it was already preexisting in imp perran.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. 

    Bianca Trovo: So that's the thing. What makes science is the fact that I do something and someone else checks it for me and [01:17:00] validates if it's correct or not. Right. Otherwise I could do science by myself and, and I would be super dogmatic about it because, you know, but if you think the process could be decoupled from a journal, like you don't necessarily need to have the whole apparatus of this, uh, publishing companies to have this sort of validation that you need in research.

    So. Well, that's what my reason is mostly about. And if you think of that, and if you keep think of removing this medium, blockchain is the only system that allows you to have this decentralization that I know, like per se. It's like every time you put something in between, it's gonna be an aggregator of, of power, let's say.

    So [01:18:00] yeah, that's kind of like, okay, I'm bullish about it also because I, I did my project on that, so I need to be convinced about my own ideas. Otherwise, yeah. Um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: no, I mean, the thing is like, I'm not, um. I like, I mean, I'm still very, I have no idea whether this would work, whether it would not work. It's, it sounds interesting to me.

    I like the general approach. Um, it sounds cool, but I just, you know, that's part of why I want to talk to you about this. I just don't know a lot of this stuff and yeah, I think, I guess I've also never really thought about what exactly the value of a pa, like where does the value of a specific paper come from?

    Does it come through the fact that it's peer reviewed? Does it come through the journal does? Yeah. I dunno. I've never really taken it apart in that sense. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. I don't know. I, I, I see that there are papers that are published in, you know, journals that don't have this high impact factor, but still they have a [01:19:00] lot of citations.

    Uh, so the impact factor of the paper is not necessary, doesn't correlate to the impact factor of the journal? Well, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. So. Yeah. Actually it's funny because I had also this discussion with the founder of Cy Hop. I had the chance to, to be part of an interview kind of, or chat, um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: okay.

    Bianca Trovo: About, uh, with Alexandra, uh, back in, and I was really asking her about blockchain, like, why don't you use blockchain? Uh, because, uh, yeah, she actually uses, uh, bitcoin for, uh, partially for getting, you know, funding. Right? So why not using blockchain also for, for the whole system of papers. And well, she didn't seem super convinced and she was like, um, well this interview is online anyway.

    You can check it, but 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: what is it? Sorry, 

    Bianca Trovo: just, um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: so I [01:20:00] can, 

    Bianca Trovo: it's some flow. I will send you the link. It's some flow. Uh, it was last, uh, September, basically, uh. S hub is, it's itself a centralized system, right? 

    Speaker 3: Yeah. 

    Bianca Trovo: But it's pirate another centralized system. So the thing is that S hub can exist until all these big publishing companies exist.

    One day when all the open access, uh, will be possible, then there is no point on stealing papers and putting on the, on this, uh, library. Exactly. Um, but at the same time, there's this problem of the value. Because if you think about it, I mean, I really a big fan of, uh, SAB and, uh, Alexandra's work. But, um, I think it solves one problem in the sense that, uh, it solves the problem of the [01:21:00] accessibility for, you know, researchers and citizens, you know.

    The people were gonna benefit from the service of scientific production, but uh, still the people who produce science don't get anything from that, basically because, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. So that's why, uh, if you have, uh, a blockchain system that also rewards the people who produce those outputs, then you can have a fair system in which you don't need to steal, uh, from people who already stolen, have stolen from you, but everyone could, you know, pretty much benefit from the service and the consumption of the service.

    Service and the work put 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: into it. Right. Yeah. 

    Bianca Trovo: It's, it's something funny because something is already happening in the arts world, in the [01:22:00] artistic scenario. Like, I dunno if you have, have, uh, heard about NFT non fungible tokens? 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I've heard about it. I don't really know whether it's, whether it makes sense or not.

    I dunno. Yeah. 

    Bianca Trovo: Well maybe now there is a bit of a speculative bubble as well. Uh, but, uh, in theory is this the, I think that, uh, the problem that we have in science is the same that artists have because they make art. And then the ones that make the money are actually the, you know, the ones that produce your work and communicate your work.

    So even if you just put your music or your artwork on, you know, YouTube and so on, Spotify, they are the ones making the money, not you, you get a little tiny bit of profit from all the visualizations and so on. And and you [01:23:00] don't own your content completely. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. But yeah, I mean I saw that today you, or not today, you tweeted, but I saw you, you retweeted recently.

    Something about people suggesting that papers or whatever should also be NFTs. Yeah. This 

    Bianca Trovo: is, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: uh, or why it is, you also pointed, you were also pointed a counterpoint. Yeah. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. I was, I'm not super sure about, uh, that in the sense of bidding, like in, in an auction, like it happens with art because this is really advantages.

    If you have an auction at decentralized auction on the blockchain, then you can buy art. You know, I can buy your art and we don't have this intermediary that is making money out of this. Um, but, uh, yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't push it too much for, for, for, you know, bidding on scientific work, uh, scientific papers, though I would, I find [01:24:00] it interesting.

    Okay. Let's see what happens if you put a paper on SFT. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I still have, I haven't looked into that yet. As I said, I'm two weeks into learning our blockchain and I've said NFTs is, let me first figure out exactly what Ethereum does and then we'll get to, 

    Bianca Trovo: it's very new, actually. This is really like, uh, I mean, basically I also had two weeks of knowledge before I started and then every two weeks, every month there was something completely new coming, coming up.

    And it's really difficult to catch up with all the, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, yeah. It's very fast and, uh, it's also very technical. Uh, anyway, um, so just wanna as a last thing, just talk about like the. The future of ants and what you wanna do. I mean, it seems obvious that in a few years there's gonna be no journals, it's just gonna be ants.

    Bianca Trovo: No, it's 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: just obvious. It's just gonna be ads. It's not at all, it's gonna be the one system to rule them all. [01:25:00] Uh, but until then, yeah, I mean, like what you plan as next steps. And maybe also as part of that answer, um, how do you intend on tackling like the technical adoption difficulties? For example, I, I actually have a crypto wallet, but I haven't been able to check your thing, uh, because it's not linked to my laptop, so I don't to my work laptop, so I couldn't check it earlier.

    Mm-hmm. And I don't, I mean, I know like the whole crypto stuff is changing fairly rapidly, but I'm still, I've only had one person, uh, other than you who seems to know anything about the topic at all. Um, everyone I know has basically just. Yeah, and it's not a topic I've really talked about to anyone right now and mm-hmm.

    I guess I talk mainly to researchers, so how, yeah. If, if this has to be to become, uh, usable, how do we make that happen? 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. So [01:26:00] actually a big part of the time that, um, I invested during the fellowship at Kernel was actually, you know, looking back at the design and doing some research on the design. So basically user tests and just some very preliminary surveys with researchers that I launched on Twitter and LinkedIn to gather some ideas also about, uh, the difficulties on, you know, approaching the technology.

    And of course, we are aware of this barrier because if you don't consider. Even, actually, even among crypto researchers or blockchain researchers is not that everyone is familiar with decent centralized applications and how to use a crypto wallet to do certain transactions because it's not. So it's simply not something that you do.

    It's [01:27:00] not as easy as the web two that is just clickable. And you know, they just take all your data, they do everything for you, and you don't have anything to care about. Here, you know that, uh, you are responsible because there is no third party that is gonna take responsibility if something hap bad happens.

    So everything is done more carefully. So that's why actually, uh, after I put the project on pose to. Refocusing more on my PhD. The idea now is to, uh, also my collaborator has other projects, so he's the, uh, smart contract developer. So we decided to focus on community, on building community. Um, so basically trying to do as much dissemination of this protocol as possible, and specifically in the academic community [01:28:00]because, uh, in the blockchain community, I, we kinda seen that, uh, people are really welcoming the idea.

    We also launched a sort of mini grant on the, on Bitcoin, and we raised some money from which we paid the fees for the publication, for example, of the paper and money in crypto. Obviously in, uh, eater and, uh, Dai. And, and it's fun how, you know, the community is enthusiastically, you know, contributing to the project, although they're not concerned in the first place because most of them are not academic researchers.

    So they like, uh, the idea also the academic researchers like the idea, but again, they don't know how to, how to, so that's why I think the, having the paper, uh, published, peer reviewed and published on a journal, or actually in a book as a book chapter was a big, in the traditional way, [01:29:00] in a traditional way, was, uh, an important milestone to kind of bridge this.

    Towards, because now I see, for example, editors are reading the article. Uh, I also had the chance to talk with other laboratories that do research in blockchain in other countries. And so I think the paper is gathering some interest. Of course, it has been published just not even one month ago. So before there was one Preprint online.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, the pre-print out 

    Bianca Trovo: month. Right. Roughly two months before there was already the Preprint and before it was just, you know, I, I actually managed to release the pre-print in, uh, for end of January, let's say. So it was not Oh, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: okay. I 

    Bianca Trovo: thought it was before that for a long time. And so before it was really much about, uh, the conference that we held in, uh, Poland.

    Well, it was a online [01:30:00] conference, uh, among academics in computer science. So again, people who are. You know, competent on the topic. And so now I'm trying to reach out a bigger public. So through Twitter and also through the participation on, uh, another workshop that is gonna be held in May. That's called, uh, cool Tool for Science, uh, hosted by the Champ Mo, uh, institute in, in, um, in Portugal, uh, Lisboa.

    Basically, we are trying to. To gather some attention on the work and some discussion about it. And yeah, basically kind of low profile, but keeping the attention on every once in a while. And also looking for funding very, you know, discreetly, uh, because 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: what would the funding be for? 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah, so basically we are now two people, mainly the founders of the [01:31:00] project.

    And during the fellowship we had also some contributors, uh, especially for the front end, uh, development of the, of this application. But we don't have like, uh, a bigger team that is, you know, uh, formed. So we would like to, to have more people on board. And, and if we had a grant, also we, you know, we could pay for expenses like, uh, article publications and people working with us and so on.

    It's. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But it's mainly salary, then you, I guess you don't need an infrastructure that much if it's distributed, right? This 

    Bianca Trovo: point or, uh, no, no, no. We don't need, uh, no, we don't have, uh, so the idea was not like to create a, a startup, you know, it's really like the idea is to have a nonprofit, uh, project. But, uh, also it's something that is really, you know, inserted in the, in academia.

    So [01:32:00] for now, we are looking mostly for grants, maybe collaboration with laboratories, both from private institutions, but also universities. Yeah. So also because we have, uh, many ideas, but, uh, the implementations are not, uh, necessarily, you know, like, uh, at hand some of the things that you wanted to implement are still being built by other companies.

    So there are certain aspects that, uh, will require some time and. And of course with, uh, with, with funding, it's easier to, to carry on a project. It's, it's open source. So, and it's also not our main project right now. It's a side project, but, uh, if we had more resources, it could become a main project. I dunno.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Cool. Well, let's, I'm looking, I'm, I'm gonna [01:33:00] follow what, what happens with s 

    Bianca Trovo: Thank you. Yeah, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: let's see how it goes. It's funny, like, I can't remember, like when I asked you whether you want to do the interview, I remember three weeks ago or something. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And um, it was mainly because I thought like, okay, Bianca's doing something interesting here about like peer review and not.

    And, uh, I have like a bit of like meta science stuff on the podcast also, so that like Okay. Would fit well. I can also chat to Bianca again, like, oh, let's see. Maybe what, what this is about. Like, I don't really know anything about this. Right. And then basically through this project I've started looking into blockchain.

    Oh, that's cool. I'm happy. Like, it was, it was literally, it was literally like you, I asked, I, I saw that you had this thing going on and thought this sounds kind of interesting. And then I think at around the same time, Lex Friedman on his podcast had lots of guests who were talking about this kind of stuff.

    Right. And basically, and, and so then [01:34:00] I listened to those. I thought like, well, I'll just listen to those as kind of like background 

    Speaker 3: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: For our conversation. So I know a little bit about it. And then at some point I started realizing that this is not just about Bitcoin and money. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Which I always thought is what it was.

    And that it's much, much more than that. And I spent like the last. 10 days pretty much just reading about it. And it's really fascinating, um, that 

    Bianca Trovo: that's exactly what happened for me. Actually, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: you, you introduced a completely new world to me there. I'm not sure whether I'm grateful yet for it or I'm just wasting a lot of time, but yeah, 

    Bianca Trovo: who knows?

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. 

    Bianca Trovo: Maybe your initial onboarding to the blockchain world or to the space, as they say, will lead to something else. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, maybe. I mean, as I said, like I'm, some of my research is about game theory, so I'm very interested. That's kind of the angle from through which I'm 

    Bianca Trovo: cool 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: looking at it. Um, and, but yeah, [01:35:00] so I'll definitely be, I don't know, checking out what you're doing, 

    Bianca Trovo: but maybe if you wanna contribute as well, collaborate at some point.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So Bianca, how, that's not me necessarily specifically, but like in general, if people want to contribute, like other than giving you lots of money. 

    Bianca Trovo: No, um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I'm sorry. I'm a PhD student also. That's not 

    Bianca Trovo: how 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I could 

    Bianca Trovo: contribute. Actually, this is interesting because, uh, the way we raise the money, it's through Bitcoin, which is, uh, using this new system that might interest you very much because it's related to a new experiment for, uh, you know, um, basically, uh, distributing resources, uh, in society, which is called quadratic funding, which was developed by, um, within the radical exchange.

    Project and association, let's say, was develop developed by, [01:36:00] um, researcher in Microsoft and in political science. And basically the idea is for both quadratic voting, quadratic funding that, uh, to have a nonlinear system of, uh, of redistributing resources in the sense that, uh, is the, the amount of people engaged into specific, uh, project that counts and not how much money or votes you put in it, right?

    So for example, in, uh, Bitcoin, every once in a while there are these rounds for, uh, uh, raising money for specific grants. And we also have our answer review grant. And the cool thing is that the system works like this. Basically, uh, 1000 people that puts $1, let's say. Can have a bigger impact. That one single person that puts $1,000.

    Okay. Because basically, [01:37:00] uh, that's, there is a mathematical equation that I'm not gonna go through now, but basically, uh, the system is gonna give pay off for the, the more, uh, I mean the more amount of smaller contributions. So basically it's measuring the, the impact and, uh, interest that, uh, a specific, uh, you know, project has on the, on the community rather than, uh, favoring, you know, people who have a lot of resources.

    And so in this sense, if you want to contribute, you don't need to be rich. You can just put $1. Mm-hmm. And this will make a difference to answer review. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay, cool. And in, in, can people, I mean, you said like it's two people right now. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Let's say, can people, I don't know, start programming [01:38:00] in, what's it called again?

    What is Ethereum using again? 

    Bianca Trovo: Uh, solidity. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Solidity, yeah. Is do you need like people on that front also, or is it, 

    Bianca Trovo: well, uh, depends in the sense that, uh, right now we don't really need to. Um, we are not, we don't have plan to start programming new stuff. My collaborator basically is a backend developer. So actually we were looking for a front-end developer, so someone who uses Rinka, buy, react, uh, and so on.

    We don't have any position open, you know, because we don't have money anyone. So it could be free work in that sense. So. Any kind of collaboration, I think it's, uh, welcome on my side, especially for the research aspects, because I, I really want to, I think it's really important first to have clear ideas about the design before proceeding on a next step of, you know, product development.[01:39:00] 

    So I think now we are in this phase after we produced, uh, this, uh, first the proof of concept and the MVP, we need to rethink the design a bit. So I think we are more looking for discussions on the mechanism design, how to, how to improve it, how to, you know, implement this token engineering part because you don't want to build something and then it's totally unfunctional or people don't want to use it.

    So now we are in this contemplative. State of, uh, let's see what the community wants, what researchers wants, and what is possible doing and so on. And of course we have our Telegram channel. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I don't have Telegram. I have signal 

    Bianca Trovo: most people in this, uh, in [01:40:00] tech, uh, companies and these, uh, communities. And in blockchain they have, uh, they use Telegram and this Discord.

    So 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I still don't know what Discord is. 

    Bianca Trovo: It's kind of like Slack. It's very similar to Slack. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I never use Slack. 

    Bianca Trovo: You never use Slack. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I, I talk and I use email. That's pretty much what 

    Bianca Trovo: I do. Oh my God. No, it's much. But, uh, this, uh, yeah. And yeah, so pretty much we, we use as communication channels, Twitter and Telegram.

    And we have our substack newsletter, uh, where you are free to subscribe. Welcome to subscribe. We haven't updated much recently because there are no big, um, well the big novelties. We are trying to gather the big novelties and put in one specific newsletter. So stay tuned on our Twitter account [01:41:00] and review.

    And hopefully you will put in the as a link. I dunno how it works in the podcast. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, yeah. I'll put it in the description. 

    Bianca Trovo: Um, and that's it. I guess. Uh, you had another question, right? Or something I didn't answer? Uh, actually you had this question. Yeah. This I wanted to correct you because you were saying something about the crypto wallet and the fact of having some, you know, cryptographic knowledge or something actually.

    The fun thing of, of this, uh, of the space is that okay, there are a lot of expert people working on the, on the structure of this applications, but both users, but also people who develop, uh, applications, they don't need to, to know about cryptography to do stuff on the blockchain. Like it's super easy to use.

    Uh, crypto wallets. You just subscribe and [01:42:00] you, you buy some crypto and you start using, it's kind of like, you know, subscribing to Facebook. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, no, I mean, uh, I am, I guess my point is more that if, I guess it's more a gen, a generic point about technology or if you want someone to make a change, basically, right now, I feel like with most scientists, and I would really say it's.

    At least like the people I talk to is pretty much everyone. You have to first explain what a wallet is, A crypto wallet, 

    Bianca Trovo: of 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: course. Yeah. And basically you have to first teach them the basics and then, 

    Bianca Trovo: then can they start? Fact, I wanted to put it in the paper, but people are like, come on everyone, this is obvious.

    I was like, no, this is not obvious. This for me was the most difficult part. I was super scared when I had this crypto wallet. I was like, it's gonna suck all my money. You know? I was afraid of doing anything. No, I, no, I totally agree. That's why, um, okay. Maybe [01:43:00] this is something unanswered for the next step, because this is just a conference paper, the one that we published, but it's on the plan to expand it to a bigger paper.

    It maybe go through some technicalities that might be obvious for people in the blockchain, but not for people in academia. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, because I mean, yeah. The, the, the point is also like. I feel like if I were to suggest this to any pi, to use ants, they'd say like, what? I have to learn blockchain. I'm not doing it.

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: You know, like, 

    Bianca Trovo: I know, I know. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Because of that, like, it, it is, it's basically like you, uh, there's just like a step in between, right. 

    Bianca Trovo: I know. I know. Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, yeah. Right. So now I know like using a crypto water is super easy once you know roughly what you're doing. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, it's not that complicated, but I mean, let's put it this way.

    Like, I've been doing this for like, you know, I've been reading about this for like 10 days or something, and I still feel [01:44:00] like I have a lot of reading to do. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah, no, no, I totally feel you. And actually that's, that's what I wanted, uh, when I, when I started this point. I just wanted to, to say that, uh, I think this, uh, environment is really cool because lots of developers are putting a lot of efforts in making the centralized applications that are really easy.

    For people who are not in from this field. So basically everything that happens in between is not, uh, visible. You know, you just, uh, yeah, yeah. You just know how to use, uh, the gadgets and the wallets and everything, but you don't need to have coding skills or deep mathematical knowledge to, which is kind of the same for us nowadays with the machine learning.

    Like, uh, when we use it in, uh, in research, right? Uh, we, we use the algorithm, but we don't build the algorithm. It's [01:45:00] so, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. Yeah, definitely. 

    Bianca Trovo: And we have two 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: boxes, but I feel like it's still, yeah. It's just still new enough that I don't think most people will. Yeah. It's funny that you said, like everyone said, it's obvious.

    Um, I, I, it wasn't to me as a reader. No. Also, like one conclusion I had reading, it was kind of like, okay, I think I kind of see what you're trying to do, uh, and I kind of see how your solution might be good. I just have no way of verifying of whether anything you're saying makes any sense. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Like I don't understand any of the details either.

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. Yeah. In fact, uh, well this is also because the, the, well, the paper itself was for a very specific public of, uh, computer scientists. And also we had limited, uh, pages. So we had to really to stay within 12 pages. And we had so much to say we had to cut many parts that, uh, [01:46:00] we, we hope to include in a bigger paper.

    So, but uh, yeah, I think a good point is to have maybe some mini tutorials. That not only explain the concept, but also how to use the tools that are, you know, prerequisites in, uh, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: that's why I found your video very useful because I have to admit, like when I read the paper, so I first read the paper and wrote down some questions and one of my questions or almost criticism was like, my assumption was that you have to start coding to use ants.

    'cause you said like, we use this function or something like that. I was like, oh wait, you want people to program how to, to do peer review? Like that's, people are not gonna do that. And then I saw the video and so like, oh, there is a gooey, okay. I can see why people, how like it seemed much simpler once I saw the video.

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Rather than just reading the paper. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But then again, as you said, I'm probably not the target audience for that [01:47:00] paper. Really? 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. The functions are supposed to be invisible. In the processing. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. But when I read it, I thought like, okay, this is, looks really complicated just to submit a paper or something.

    But it's, it's super simple when you watch the video. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well thanks for your feedback. It's, it's another person other than me that thinks that crypto wallets are complicated when you don't know what they are. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Yeah. I mean that's the whole, uh, the, I think Stephen Pinker called it the Curse of Knowledge or maybe he citing someone else.

    Right. 

    Bianca Trovo: What 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: it's impossible to 

    Bianca Trovo: Stephen Pinker. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Uh, Stephen Pinker, he has this book called Sense of Style, I think, um, about writing and that he says like a lot of academic writing in particular is very bad because people can't imagine the stuff they don't know. Like they can't imagine not knowing what they know.

    So that's the way. Or rather, it's not even that that's writing is bad. It's more, it uses a lot of jargon [01:48:00]because people assume everyone knows everything. And it seems to me, I'm not saying your paper is bad or anything, but for me it wasn't. And lots of points were very readable of course, but like a lot of the technical stuff, I just had like no idea what most of this means.

    Um, and it's probably just because, as you said, everyone else said, it's obvious everyone knows how this works. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Because they probably can't imagine that most, even, most computational neuroscientists don't spend most of the time doing computer science. 

    Bianca Trovo: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. 

    Bianca Trovo: And I guess it's the same if you talk to computer scientists about things that we do in competition neuroscience.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. It's just anything. Right. It's very.