Biography:Samer Hassan

From HandWiki
Short description: Spanish/Lebanese activist and researcher specialized in decentralized collaboration
Samer Hassan
Samer Hassan.png
Born
Samer Hassan Collado

1982 (age 41–42)
Madrid, Spain
NationalitySpanish / Lebanese
Other namesSamer Walid Hassan
Alma materUniversidad Complutense de Madrid, University of Surrey
AwardsTriple Canopy, ERC Grant
Scientific career
FieldsBlockchain, Commons, Peer-to-peer, Agent-based modelling, Social simulation
InstitutionsUniversidad Complutense de Madrid, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (Harvard University)
ThesisTowards a Data-driven Approach for Agent-Based Modelling: Simulating Spanish Postmodernisation (2010)
Doctoral advisorJuan Pavón, Millán Arroyo Mendéndez
Websitehttps://samer.hassan.name

Samer Hassan is a computer scientist, social scientist, activist and researcher, focused on the use of decentralized technologies to support commons-based collaboration. He is Associate Professor at Universidad Complutense de Madrid[1] (Spain) and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.[2] He is the recipient of an ERC Grant of 1.5M€ with the P2P Models project, to research blockchain-based decentralized autonomous organizations for the collaborative economy.[3]

Education & career

Samer Hassan is a scholar with an interdisciplinary background, which combines computer sciences with social sciences and activism. He received a degree in Computer Science and MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) in Spain. He also studied 3 years of Political Science at the distance learning university UNED.[4] He has then undertaken a PhD in Social Simulation at the department of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence of UCM, supervised by the computer scientist Juan Pavón and the sociologist Millán Arroyo-Menéndez.[5]

He has been researching in several institutions, funded by several scholarships and awards, most notably Harvard's Real Colegio Complutense,[6] and the Spanish postdoctoral grants Juan de la Cierva and José Castillejo.[7] Thus, he was a visiting researcher at the Centre for Research in Social Simulation, in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey in the UK, working under the supervision of Nigel Gilbert (2007-2008),[8] and a lecturer at the American University of Science and Technology in Lebanon (2010–11).[9] He was selected as Fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University (2015-2017)[10] and is presently a Faculty Associate at the same structure.[11]

Activism & social engagement

As an activist, Samer Hassan has been engaged in both offline (La Tabacalera de Lavapiés,[12] Medialab-Prado)[13] and online (Ourproject.org,[14] Barrapunto,[15] Wikipedia[16]) initiatives. He was accredited as a grassroots facilitator by the Altekio Cooperative.[6] He co-founded the Comunes Nonprofit in 2009[14] and the Move Commons webtool project in 2010.[17][18] He has co-organized practitioner-oriented workshops on platform co-ops[19] and free/open source decentralized tools for communities,[20] and has presented his work in non-academic conferences of Mozilla,[21] the Internet Archive,[22] and others.[9] As a privacy advocate, he co-created a course on cyber-ethics which has been teaching since 2013 (as of 2021).[23][24] He was co-founder of the Sci-Fdi Spanish science-fiction magazine.[25][26]

Work

Samer Hassan's PhD thesis[5] 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, data mining, natural language processing, and microsimulation.[5][27]

Hassan's interdisciplinary research spans multiple fields, including online collaborative communities,[28][29] decentralized technologies,[30] blockchain-based decentralized autonomous organizations,[31][32] free/libre/open source software,[33] Commons-based peer production,[34] agent-based social simulation,[35] social movements[36] and cyberethics.[37] He has published more than 50 works in these fields,[38] 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,[39] distribution of value in peer production communities,[40] agent-supported online assemblies,[41] decentralized real-time collaborative software,[42] decentralized blockchain based reputation,[43] or blockchain-enabled commons governance.[44]

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, a federated backend-as-a-service focused to ease development of apps featuring real-time collaboration.[45] Intellectual Property of this project was transferred to the Apache Software Foundation in 2017.[46] As part of this research line, Hassan's team also develop two SwellRT-based apps, "Teem" for management of social collectives[47][48][49] and Jetpad, a federated real time editor.[50][51][52][53] He presented the innovations concerning these software at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center[12] and Harvard's Center for Research on Computation and Society.[54]

Other research lines offered outcomes beyond publications. "Wikichron",[55][56][57] coled by Javier Arroyo, is a web tool to visualize MediaWiki community metrics, currently in production and available for third-parties.[58] "Decentralized Science",[59][60][61] 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 to receive funding as a spin-off social enterprise.[62] His research on blockchain and crowdfunding models[63] awarded him with a commission from Triple Canopy.[64] His team pushed forward a mapping of the ecosystem of blockchain for social good, led by the Joint Research Centre and published by the European Commission.[65]

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.[66] Their work has been showcased for tackling the impact of blockchain on governance,[67][68][69] proposing alternatives to the current sharing economy,[70][71][72][73][74] emerging forms of techno-social systems like NFTs,[75][76] or giving relevance to gender issues in the field.[44][77] Hassan was invited to present the project achievements in Harvard Kennedy School,[66] MIT Media Lab,[78] Harvard's Data Privacy Lab,[79] Harvard's Center for Research on Computation and Society,[80] and Harvard's SEAS EconCS.[81] British MP and Opposition Leader Ed Miliband showcased his research and its potential impact on policy.[82]

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

See also

References

  1. "Samer Hassan Collado at Universidade Complutense de Madrid". https://www.ucm.es/disia/directorio/?id=26137. 
  2. "Samer Hassan at Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard". https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/shassan. 
  3. "P2PModels: Decentralized Blockchain-based Organizations for Bootstrapping the Collaborative Economy". https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/212785/factsheet/en. 
  4. Fernández, Jaime (2018-01-30). "Samer Hassan, nuevo ERC starting grant para la Complutense". Tribuna Complutense. https://tribuna.ucm.es/213/art3104.php. 
  5. 5.0 5.1 5.2 Hassan, Samer (2009). Towards a Data-driven Approach for Agent-Based Modelling: Simulating Spanish Postmodernisation (info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis). Universidad Complutense de Madrid. p. 225.
  6. 6.0 6.1 "Samer Hassan at Real Colegio Complutense". https://rcc.harvard.edu/people/samer-hassan. 
  7. "BOE.es - Documento BOE-A-2015-12976". https://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2015-12976. 
  8. "Samer Hassan at Surrey University". http://cress.soc.surrey.ac.uk/web/people/samer. 
  9. 9.0 9.1 Miemis, Venessa (2011-07-02). "Contact Update: 2nd Round Scholarship Winners" (in en). https://emergentbydesign.com/2011/07/02/contact-update-2nd-round-scholarship-winners/. 
  10. "Berkman Center Announces 2015-2016 Community". 19 October 2015. https://cyber.harvard.edu/newsroom/2015_2016_community. 
  11. "Samer Hassan at Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard". https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/shassan. 
  12. 12.0 12.1 "Translating Research into Online Tools to Increase Participation in Collaborative Communities" (in en). 2019-07-20. https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/10/Hassan. 
  13. "Move Commons" (in es). https://www.medialab-prado.es/actividades/move-commons. 
  14. 14.0 14.1 "Behind Comunes | Comunes". https://comunes.org/behind/. 
  15. "Profile of Samer in Barrapunto". 2 November 2015. http://barrapunto.com/~Samer/. 
  16. "Short CV" (in en-US). 2014-11-30. https://samer.hassan.name/short-cv/. 
  17. Gutiérrez, Bernardo (2012-08-23). "La era de la polinización cruzada". 20 Minutos. https://blogs.20minutos.es/codigo-abierto/2012/08/23/la-era-de-la-polinizacion-cruzada/. 
  18. Javelle, Eddie (2012-03-15). "L'OpenWeek, format d'animation pour les tiers-lieux et espaces de coworking" (in fr-FR). https://zevillage.net/espaces-de-travail/lopenweek-format-danimation-pour-les-tiers-lieux-et-espaces-de-coworking/. 
  19. (in en) Workshop on Platform Cooperativism, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFC8baZnvJY, retrieved 2019-12-23 
  20. Pinchen, Chris (2016-04-17). "FLOSS4P2P Workshop Agenda" (in en-GB). https://p2pvalue.eu/floss4p2p-workshop-agenda/. 
  21. "Drumbeat/events/Festival/program/move commons - MozillaWiki". https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/events/Festival/program/move_commons. 
  22. "What Is the Decentralized Web? 25 Experts Break it Down - Blog | iSchool@Syracuse" (in en). 2016-07-22. https://ischoolonline.syr.edu/blog/what-is-the-decentralized-web/. 
  23. Madrid, Facultad de Informática-Universidad Complutense de. "Facultad de Informática - Universidad Complutense de Madrid" (in es). http://web.fdi.ucm.es/Guia_Docente/Prog_asignatura.asp?fdicurso=2013-2014&titu=44. 
  24. "Universidad Complutense de Madrid". https://www.ucm.es/estudios/grado-informaticaymatematicas-plan-900265. 
  25. "Sci-FdI 1 | Ficha | Biblioteca | La Tercera Fundación". https://tercerafundacion.net/biblioteca/ver/ficha/17985. 
  26. "BUCM :: Sci·Fdi:Revista de ciencia ficción :: Biblioteca Complutense". http://webs.ucm.es/BUCM/revcul//sci-fdi/. 
  27. "Injecting Data into Simulation: Can Agent-Based Modelling Learn from Microsimulation?" (in en). http://videolectures.net/cvss08_hassan_idis/. 
  28. "The Commons Collaborative Economy Explodes in Barcelona". 21 April 2016. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-21/the-commons-collaborative-economy-explodes-in-barcelona/. 
  29. (in en) CAPS2015 - Samer Hassan's interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1Kp690ooGU, retrieved 2019-12-10 
  30. "Distributed technologies to bootstrap the sharing economy". 30 April 2019. https://p2pmodels.eu/distributed-technologies-to-bootstrap-the-sharing-economy/. 
  31. "Reinventing the Collaborative Economy with Blockchain-driven Democratic Organizations". 30 November 2018. https://p2pmodels.eu/reinventing-the-collaborative-economy/. 
  32. Hassan, Samer; Filippi, Primavera De (2021-04-20). "Decentralized Autonomous Organization". Internet Policy Review 10 (2). doi:10.14763/2021.2.1556. ISSN 2197-6775. https://policyreview.info/glossary/DAO. 
  33. "Steal this Show with Samer Hassan". https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/steal-this-show/e/how-p2p-will-save-the-world-with-samer-hassan-49672523. 
  34. "P2Pvalue. Decentralized technologies to support digital commons". https://www.cccb.org/en/multimedia/videos/p2pvalue-decentralized-technologies-to-support-digital-commons/210779. 
  35. "Agent-Based Social Modeling and Simulation with Fuzzy Sets". https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227059621. 
  36. "Samer Hassan at Digital Social Innovation Fair". 3 April 2018. https://www.dsifair.eu/speakers/samer-hassan/. 
  37. "Samer Hassan at Real Colegio Complutense". https://rcc.harvard.edu/people/samer-hassan. 
  38. "Samer Hassan - Google Scholar Citations". https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=t-R8WmsAAAAJ. 
  39. "MOVE COMMONS: Labeling, opening and connecting social initiatives". http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/move-commons-labeling-opening-and-connecting-social-initiatives. 
  40. De Filippi, Primavera; Hassan, Samer (2015). "Measuring Value in Commons-Based Ecosystem: Bridging the Gap between the Commons and the Market". The MoneyLab Reader, Institute of Network Cultures. 
  41. Tenorio, Antonio; Hassan, Samer (2014). "Towards an Agent-supported Online Assembly: Prototyping a Collaborative Decision-Making Tool". COLLA 2014: The Fourth International Conference on Advanced Collaborative Networks, Systems and Applications. http://www.thinkmind.org/download.php?articleid=colla_2014_3_40_60053. Retrieved 8 December 2019. 
  42. Ojanguren-Menendez, Paolo; Tenorio, Antonio; Hassan, Samer (2015). "Building Real-Time Collaborative Applications with a Federated Architecture". International Journal of Interactive Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence 3 (5): 47. doi:10.9781/ijimai.2015.356. https://www.ijimai.org/journal/node/861. Retrieved 8 December 2019. 
  43. Hassan, Samer; De Filippi, Primavera. "Reputation and Quality Indicators to improve Community Governance". http://conferences.chalmers.se/index.php/Transvaluation/Transvaluation/paper/viewFile/1846/506. 
  44. 44.0 44.1 Rozas, David; Tenorio-Fornes, Antonio; Diaz-Molina, Silvia; Hassan, Samer (30 July 2018). When Ostrom Meets Blockchain: Exploring the Potentials of Blockchain for Commons Governance. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3272329. https://eprints.ucm.es/id/eprint/59643/7/21582440211002526.pdf. 
  45. "A substantial boost for easily and safely producing new online apps". https://cordis.europa.eu/article/rcn/122080/en. 
  46. "March2017 - Incubator Wiki". https://wiki.apache.org/incubator/March2017. 
  47. "Collaboration that doesn't give others a license to distribute your stuff" (in en). Horizon: the EU Research & Innovation magazine. https://horizon-magazine.eu/article/collaboration-doesn-t-give-others-license-distribute-your-stuff_en.html. 
  48. "Una app para involucrar a más gente en proyectos colaborativos - El salmón contracorriente" (in es). http://www.elsalmoncontracorriente.es/?Una-app-para-involucrar-a-mas. 
  49. "Teem" (in en-US). http://teem.works/. 
  50. "European Commission: CORDIS: News and Events: A substantial boost for easily and safely producing new online apps". http://cordis.europa.eu/news/rcn/128080_en.html. 
  51. Público (2016-12-08). "Democracia radical a golpe de app" (in es). https://www.publico.es/sociedad/democracia-radical-golpe-app.html. 
  52. Haste, Rough (2017-04-23). "Notes on "How P2P Will Save the World"". https://medium.com/roughhaste/notes-on-how-p2p-will-save-the-world-a12db16d1b47. 
  53. "JetPad". http://jetpad.net/. 
  54. "SwellRT: Facilitating decentralized real-time collaboration" (in en). https://crcs.seas.harvard.edu/event/crcs-seminar-5. 
  55. Juste, Abel 'Akronix' Serrano. "WikiChron - Welcome" (in en). http://wikichron.science/. 
  56. "Wikichron". http://wikipapers.referata.com/wiki/Wikichron. 
  57. Serrano, Abel; Arroyo, Javier; Hassan, Samer (2018). "Participation Inequality in Wikis". Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration. OpenSym '18. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 12:1–12:7. doi:10.1145/3233391.3233536. ISBN 978-1-4503-5936-8. https://eprints.ucm.es/id/eprint/59637/7/OpenSym2018_paper_311.pdf. 
  58. (in en) Presenting WikiChron: A tool to visualize collaboration in wikis., MediaWiki official Youtube channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX1ZVh1k2nw, retrieved 2019-12-10 
  59. "Decentralized Science". https://decentralized.science/. 
  60. Tenorio-Fornés, Antonio; Jacynycz, Viktor; Llop-Vila, David; Sánchez-Ruiz, Antonio; Hassan, Samer (2019-01-08). Towards a Decentralized Process for Scientific Publication and Peer Review using Blockchain and IPFS. doi:10.24251/HICSS.2019.560. ISBN 978-0-9981331-2-6. 
  61. Jacynycz, Viktor; Sánchez-Ruiz, Antonio; Tenorio-Fornés, Antonio (in en). A Decentralized Publication System for Open Science using Blockchain and IPFS. https://www.academia.edu/36177311. 
  62. "LEDGER selects 16 human-centric projects working on decentralised technologies to enter its Venture Builder programme" (in en-GB). Ledger: European Commission NGI Programme. https://ledgerproject.eu/index.php/2019/05/30/ledger-selects-16-human-centric-projects-working-on-decentralised-technologies-to-enter-its-venture-builder-programme/. 
  63. Jacynycz, Viktor; Calvo, Adrian; Hassan, Samer; Sánchez-Ruiz, Antonio A. (2016). "Betfunding: A Distributed Bounty-Based Crowdfunding Platform over Ethereum". in Omatu, Sigeru; Semalat, Ali; Bocewicz, Grzegorz et al. (in en). Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence, 13th International Conference. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing. 474. Springer International Publishing. pp. 403–411. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-40162-1_44. ISBN 978-3-319-40162-1. 
  64. "Submissions" (in en). https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/submissions. 
  65. Hassan, S.; Brekke, J.K.; Atzori, M.; Bodó, B.; Meiklejohn, S.; De Filippi, P.; Beecroft, K.; Rozas, D. et al. (2020). Scanning the European ecosystem of distributed ledger technologies for social and public good: what, why, where, how, and ways to move forward.. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. doi:10.2760/300796. ISBN 978-92-76-21577-6. https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC121675. 
  66. 66.0 66.1 "Can Blockchain Facilitate the Governance of Commons-oriented Communities?". 5 December 2018. https://medium.com/digitalhks/can-blockchain-facilitate-the-governance-of-commons-oriented-communities-253008c91efd. 
  67. Lobe, Von Adrian (2018-04-08). "The dangers of the crypto-polar utopia (translated from German)" (in de). Süddeutsche Zeitung. ISSN 0174-4917. https://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/smart-contracts-wenn-der-algorithmus-selbstjustiz-uebt-1.3934283. 
  68. (in en) Samer Hassan - Interview at DSIFair2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRZOcAYnmuM, retrieved 2019-12-10 
  69. "Blockchains: Distributed ledgers but centrally controlled processes?" (in en-US). 2019-06-10. https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/innovation/blockchains-distributed-ledgers-but-centrally-controlled-processes/. 
  70. "Samer Hassan" (in en-US). 2019-10-14. https://digitalfuturesociety.com/qanda/samer-hassan/. 
  71. "Annenberg-Oxford: Creative Approaches to Media Challenges". 2018. http://pcmlp.socleg.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/AnOx-2018-full.pdf. 
  72. López, Genoveva (2019-04-22). "Who owns the collaborative economy? (translated from Spanish)" (in es). El Salto. https://www.elsaltodiario.com/economia/duenos-economia-colaborativa-uber-airbnb. 
  73. "Decentralizing Power and Value with P2P Models | Berkman Klein Center" (in en). 2021-07-09. https://cyber.harvard.edu/story/2021-06/decentralizing-power-and-value-p2p-models. 
  74. Hassan, Samer (2020-12-08). "Toward a Digital Economy That's Truly Collaborative, Not Exploitative" (in en-US). https://thereboot.com/toward-a-digital-economy-thats-truly-collaborative-not-exploitative/. 
  75. López, Genoveva; Lorite, Álvaro. "NFT, ¿ángel o demonio en el mundo del arte digital?" (in Spanish). https://www.elsaltodiario.com/criptomonedas/criptomonedas-nft-angel-demonio-mundo-arte-digital. 
  76. Carne Cruda - Robots que curan y bots fascistas (A CIENCIAS Y A LOCAS #547) [Raw meat - Robots that heal and fascist bots (Cracy science #547)] (in español). Eldiario.es. 2019.
  77. "Elena Martinez and Silvia Díaz of P2P Models on Blockchain, Feminism and Affective P2P". 31 July 2018. http://commonstransition.org/elena-martinez-and-silvia-diaz-of-p2p-models-on-blockchain-feminism-and-affective-p2p/. 
  78. "Collaborative Economy/Blockchain Talk by Samer Hassan" (in en-US). https://dci.mit.edu/dcieventscalendar/samerhassantalk. 
  79. "Talks on Technology Science (ToTS) and Topics in Privacy (TIP) - Data Privacy Lab". http://dataprivacylab.org/TIP/. 
  80. "Samer Hassan: Towards a New Collaborative Economy: Decentralizing Power and Value with Blockchain" (in en). https://crcs.seas.harvard.edu/event/samer-hassan-towards-new-collaborative-economy-decentralizing-power-and-value-blockchain. 
  81. "Samer_Hassan 2017 09 15-EconCS_Seminar-" (in en). https://video.seas.harvard.edu/media/Samer_Hassan+2017+09+15-EconCS_Seminar-/1_keyt2szw. 
  82. Miliband, Ed; Lloyd, Geoff (2018-07-30). "#45: BLOCKCHAIN PARTY: Can it be a force for good?". https://www.acast.com/reasonstobecheerful/45.blockchainparty-canitbeaforceforgood-. 

External links