Samer Hassan is a

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus ( ...

activist Activism (or Advocacy) consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct or intervene in social, political, economic or environmental reform with the desire to make changes in society toward a perceived greater good. Forms of activism range fr ...

and researcher, focused on the use of decentralized technologies to support

commons The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons c ...

-based collaboration. He is

Associate Professor Associate professor is an academic title with two principal meanings: in the North American system and that of the ''Commonwealth system''. Overview In the '' North American system'', used in the United States and many other countries, it is ...

Universidad Complutense de Madrid The Complutense University of Madrid ( es, Universidad Complutense de Madrid; UCM, links=no, ''Universidad de Madrid'', ''Universidad Central de Madrid''; la, Universitas Complutensis Matritensis, links=no) is a public research university loca ...

(Spain) and Faculty Associate at the

Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, ...

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

. He is the recipient of an ERC Grant of 1.5M€ with the P2P Models project, to research

blockchain A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that consists of growing lists of records, called ''blocks'', that are securely linked together using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, ...

-based decentralized autonomous organizations for the

collaborative economy Collaborative economy may refer to: * Collaborative consumption * Sharing economy In capitalism, the sharing economy is a socio-economic system built around the sharing of resources. It often involves a way of purchasing goods and services that d ...

Education & career

Samer Hassan is a scholar with an

interdisciplinary Interdisciplinarity or interdisciplinary studies involves the combination of multiple academic disciplines into one activity (e.g., a research project). It draws knowledge from several other fields like sociology, anthropology, psychology, ec ...

background, which combines

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...

s with

social science Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of soc ...

s and

activism Activism (or Advocacy) consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct or intervene in social, political, economic or environmental reform with the desire to make changes in society toward a perceived greater good. Forms of activism range fr ...

. He received a degree in Computer Science and MSc in

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

from the

(UCM) in Spain. He also studied 3 years of Political Science at the distance learning university

UNED The National Distance Education University, known in Spanish as ''Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia'' (UNED), is a public research university of national scope. The university was founded in 1972 under the Ministry of Universit ...

. He has then undertaken a PhD in

Social Simulation Social simulation is a research field that applies computational methods to study issues in the social sciences. The issues explored include problems in computational law, psychology, organizational behavior, sociology, political science, e ...

at the department of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence of UCM, supervised by the computer scientist Juan Pavón and the sociologist Millán Arroyo-Menéndez. He has been researching in several institutions, funded by several scholarships and awards, most notably Harvard's Real Colegio Complutense, and the Spanish postdoctoral grants

Juan de la Cierva Juan de la Cierva y Codorníu, 1st Count of la Cierva (; 21 September 1895 in Murcia, Spain – 9 December 1936 in Croydon, United Kingdom) was a Spanish civil engineer, pilot and a self taught aeronautical engineer. His most famous accomplish ...

and José Castillejo. Thus, he was a visiting researcher at the Centre for Research in Social Simulation at the

University of Surrey The University of Surrey is a public research university in Guildford, Surrey, England. The university received its royal charter in 1966, along with a number of other institutions following recommendations in the Robbins Report. The institu ...

in the UK, working under the supervision of

Nigel Gilbert Geoffrey Nigel Gilbert (born 21 March 1950) is a British sociologist and a pioneer in the use of agent-based models in the social sciences. He is the founder and director of the ''Centre for Research in Social Simulation'' (University of Surre ...

(2007-2008), and a lecturer at the American University of Science and Technology in Lebanon (2010–11). He was selected as Fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at

(2015-2017) and is presently a Faculty Associate at the same structure.

Activism & social engagement

As an activist, Samer Hassan has been engaged in both offline ( La Tabacalera de Lavapiés, Medialab-Prado) and online ( Ourproject.org,

Barrapunto Barrapunto was a Spanish-language Slashdot-like website, founded on 7 June 1999, which is part of a complex social network among Spanish-language websites. In 2006, it was the winner of a 20Blogs Award from the online newspaper '' 20 minutos'' ...

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read ref ...

) initiatives. He was accredited as a grassroots facilitator by the Altekio Cooperative. He co-founded the Comunes Nonprofit in 2009 and the Move Commons webtool project in 2010. He has co-organized practitioner-oriented workshops on platform co-ops and free/open source decentralized tools for communities, and has presented his work in non-academic conferences of

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, w ...

, the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music ...

, and others. As a privacy advocate, he co-created a course on cyber-ethics which has been teaching since 2013 (as of 2021). He was co-founder of the Sci-Fdi Spanish

science-fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel univer ...

magazine.

Work

Samer Hassan's PhD thesis focused on the methodological challenges for building data-driven social simulation models. The main model built simulated the transition from modern values to postmodern values in Spain. His methodological work also explored the combination of different Artificial Intelligence technologies, i.e. software agents with

fuzzy logic Fuzzy logic is a form of many-valued logic in which the truth value of variables may be any real number between 0 and 1. It is employed to handle the concept of partial truth, where the truth value may range between completely true and complet ...

, data mining,

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...

, and

microsimulation Microsimulation (from microanalytic simulation or microscopic simulation) is a category of computerized analytical tools that perform highly detailed analysis of activities such as highway traffic flowing through an intersection, financial transact ...

. Hassan's interdisciplinary research spans multiple fields, including online collaborative communities, decentralized technologies,

-based decentralized autonomous organizations, free/libre/open source software,

Commons-based peer production Commons-based peer production (CBPP) is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler. It describes a model of socio-economic production in which large numbers of people work cooperatively; usually over the Internet. Commons-bas ...

agent-based social simulation Agent-based social simulation (or ABSS) consists of social simulations that are based on agent-based modeling, and implemented using artificial agent technologies. Agent-based social simulation is a scientific discipline concerned with simulation of ...

social movements A social movement is a loosely organized effort by a large group of people to achieve a particular goal, typically a social or political Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or ...

and

cyberethics Cyber ethics is the philosophic study of ethics pertaining to computers, encompassing user behavior and what computers are programmed to do, and how this affects individuals and society. For years, various governments have enacted regulations ...

. He has published more than 50 works in these fields, and is recently focused on experimenting with multiple software systems to facilitate commons-based peer production, e.g. semantic-web labelling for commons-based initiatives, distribution of value in peer production communities, agent-supported online assemblies, decentralized real-time collaborative software, decentralized blockchain based reputation, or blockchain-enabled commons governance. Hassan was Principal Investigator of the UCM partner in the EU-funded P2Pvalue project on building decentralized web-tools for collaborative communities. As such, he led the team that created

SwellRT SwellRT is a free and open-source backend-as-a-service and API focused to ease development of apps featuring real-time collaboration. It supports the building of mobile and web apps, and aims to facilitate interoperability and federation. Hist ...

, a federated backend-as-a-service focused to ease development of apps featuring real-time collaboration. Intellectual Property of this project was transferred to the Apache Software Foundation in 2017. As part of this research line, Hassan's team also develop two SwellRT-based apps, "Teem" for management of social collectives and Jetpad, a federated real time editor. He presented the innovations concerning these software at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center and Harvard's

Center for Research on Computation and Society The Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS, commonly pronounced "circus") is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on interdisciplinary research combining computer science with social sciences. It is based in Harvard ...

. Other research lines offered outcomes beyond publications. "Wikichron", coled by Javier Arroyo, is a web tool to visualize MediaWiki community metrics, currently in production and available for third-parties. "Decentralized Science", led by Hassan's PhD student Ámbar Tenorio-Fornés, is a framework to facilitate decentralized infrastructure and open peer review in the scientific publication process, which has been selected by the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body ...

to receive funding as a spin-off social enterprise. His research on blockchain and crowdfunding models awarded him with a commission from

Triple Canopy Triple Canopy, Inc., is an American private security company that provides integrated security, mission support and risk management services to corporate, government and nonprofit clients. The firm was founded in May 2003 by Army Special Forc ...

. His team pushed forward a mapping of the ecosystem of blockchain for social good, led by the

Joint Research Centre The Joint Research Centre (JRC) is the European Commission's science and knowledge service which employs scientists to carry out research in order to provide independent scientific advice and support to European Union (EU) policy. The JRC is ...

and published by the European Commission. As part of his ERC project P2P Models, Samer Hassan and his team are investigating whether blockchain technology and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations could contribute to improving the governance of commons-oriented communities, both online and offline. Their work has been showcased for tackling the impact of blockchain on governance, proposing alternatives to the current sharing economy, emerging forms of techno-social systems like

NFTs The National Film and Television School (NFTS) is a film, television and games school established in 1971 and based at Beaconsfield Studios in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England. It is featured in the 2021 ranking by ''The Hollywood Repor ...

, or giving relevance to gender issues in the field. Hassan was invited to present the project achievements in

Harvard Kennedy School The Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), officially the John F. Kennedy School of Government, is the school of public policy and government of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The school offers master's degrees in public policy, public a ...

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

, Harvard's Data Privacy Lab, Harvard's

, and Harvard's

SEAS This is a list of seas of the World Ocean, including marginal seas, areas of water, various gulfs, bights, bays, and straits. Terminology * Ocean – the four to seven largest named bodies of water in the World Ocean, all of which have "Ocean ...

EconCS. British MP and Opposition Leader

Ed Miliband Edward Samuel "Ed" Miliband (born 24 December 1969) is a British politician serving as Shadow Secretary of State for Climate Change and Net Zero since 2021. He has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Doncaster North since 2005. Miliban ...

showcased his research and its potential impact on policy.

Selected works

* Rozas, D., Tenorio-Fornes, A., Diaz-Molina, S., Hassan, S. (2021). When Ostrom Meets Blockchain: Exploring the Potentials of Blockchain for Commons Governance. SAGE Open 11(1), 21582440211002526. https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440211002526 *Faqir-Rhazoui, Y., Ariza-Garzón, M. J., Arroyo, J., & Hassan, S. (2021). Effect of the Gas Price Surges on User Activity in the DAOs of the Ethereum Blockchain. In 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–7). https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451755 *Hassan, S., & De Filippi, P. (2021). Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Glossary of decentralised technosocial systems. Internet Policy Review, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.14763/2021.2.1556 *Hassan, S., Brekke, J.K., Atzori, M., Bodó, B., Meiklejohn, S., De Filippi, P., Beecroft, K., Rozas, D., Orgaz Alonso, C., Martínez Vicente, E., Lopéz Morales, G. and Figueras Aguilar, A. (2020). Scanning the European Ecosystem of Distributed Ledger Technologies for Social and Public Good, Roque Mendes Polvora, A., Hakami, A. and Bol, E. editor(s), EUR 30364 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2020, ISBN 978-92-76-21577-6, https://doi.org/10.2760/300796 *De Filippi, P., & Hassan, S. (2016). Blockchain technology as a regulatory technology: From code is law to law is code. ''First Monday'', ''21''(12). http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i12.7113 *Hassan, S., Arroyo, J., Galán, J. M., Antunes, L., & Pavón, J. (2013). Asking the oracle: Introducing forecasting principles into agent-based modelling. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 16(3), 13 https://doi.org/10.18564/jasss.2241

References

External links