Samer Hassan is a computer scientist, social scientist, activist and researcher, focused on the study of the collaborative economy, online communities and decentralized technologies. 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]

Samer Hassan
Born
Samer Hassan Collado

1982 (age 41–42)
Madrid, Spain
NationalitySpanish / Lebanese
Other namesSamer Hassan Collado
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)
Thesis Towards a Data-driven Approach for Agent-Based Modelling: Simulating Spanish Postmodernisation  (2010)
Doctoral advisorJuan Pavón, Millán Arroyo Mendéndez
Websitehttps://samer.hassan.name

Education & career

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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

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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

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Hassan's interdisciplinary research spans multiple fields, including online communities,[27][28] online governance,[29] online collaboration,[30] decentralized technologies,[31] blockchain-based decentralized autonomous organizations,[32][33] free/libre/open source software,[34] Commons-based peer production,[35] agent-based social simulation,[36] social movements[37] and cyberethics.[38] He has published more than 60 works in these fields.[39]

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][40]

In his postdoctoral period, he focused on experimenting with multiple software systems to facilitate the collaborative economy, e.g. semantic-web labelling for commons-based initiatives,[41] distribution of value in peer production communities,[42] agent-supported online assemblies,[43] decentralized real-time collaborative software,[44] decentralized blockchain based reputation,[45] or blockchain-enabled commons governance.[46]

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.[30] Intellectual Property of this project was transferred to the Apache Software Foundation in 2017.[47] As part of this research line, Hassan's team also develop two SwellRT-based apps, "Teem" for management of social collectives[48][49][50] and Jetpad, a federated real time editor.[51][52][53][54] He presented the innovations concerning these software at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center[12] and Harvard's Center for Research on Computation and Society.[55]

Other research lines offered outcomes beyond publications. "Wikichron",[56][57][58] coled by Javier Arroyo, is a web tool to visualize MediaWiki community metrics, currently in production and available for third-parties.[59] "Decentralized Science",[60][61][62] 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.[63] His research on blockchain and crowdfunding models[64] awarded him with a commission from Triple Canopy.[65] 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.[66]

As part of his ERC project P2P Models, Samer Hassan and his team –including Silvia Semenzin– are investigating whether blockchain technology and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations could contribute to improving the governance of commons-oriented communities, both online and offline.[29] 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.[77] Hassan was invited to present the project achievements in Harvard Kennedy School,[29] 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] The project made public its way of organizing[83] and its core values.[84] In particular, it has shown a commitment to diversity as a core value[84] in hiring,[85][86] or choosing case studies.[87] This may be related to Hassan being Spanish/Lebanese or using "he/they" as pronouns.[2][88]

Selected works

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  • Arroyo, Javier; Davó, David; Martínez-Vicente, Elena; Faqir-Rhazoui, Youssef; Hassan, Samer (8 November 2022). "DAO-Analyzer: Exploring Activity and Participation in Blockchain Organizations" (PDF). Companion Publication of the 2022 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. CSCW'22 Companion. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 193–196. doi:10.1145/3500868.3559707. ISBN 978-1-4503-9190-0.
  • Rozas, David; Tenorio-Fornés, Antonio; Díaz-Molina, Silvia; Hassan, Samer (2021). "When Ostrom Meets Blockchain: Exploring the Potentials of Blockchain for Commons Governance". SAGE Open. 11 (1): 215824402110025. doi:10.1177/21582440211002526. ISSN 2158-2440.
  • Faqir-Rhazoui, Youssef; Ariza-Garzón, Miller-Janny; Arroyo, Javier; Hassan, Samer (8 May 2021). "Effect of the Gas Price Surges on User Activity in the DAOs of the Ethereum Blockchain" (PDF). Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI EA '21. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 1–7. doi:10.1145/3411763.3451755. ISBN 978-1-4503-8095-9.
  • Hassan, Samer; Filippi, Primavera De (20 April 2021). "Decentralized Autonomous Organization". Internet Policy Review. 10 (2). doi:10.14763/2021.2.1556. ISSN 2197-6775.
  • Joint Research Centre (European Commission); Hassan, Samer; Hakami, Anna; Brekke, Jaya Klara; De Filippi, Primavera; Lopéz Morales, Genoveva; Pólvora, Alexandre; Orgaz Alonso, Christian; Bodó, Balázs (2020). Scanning the European ecosystem of distributed ledger technologies for social and public good: what, why, where, how, and ways to move forward. LU: Publications Office of the European Union. doi:10.2760/300796. ISBN 978-92-76-21578-3.
  • Filippi, Primavera De; Hassan, Samer (14 November 2016). "Blockchain technology as a regulatory technology: From code is law to law is code". First Monday. arXiv:1801.02507. doi:10.5210/fm.v21i12.7113. ISSN 1396-0466.

See also

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References

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  1. ^ "Samer Hassan Collado at Universidad Complutense de Madrid".
  2. ^ a b "Samer Hassan at Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard". Retrieved 8 December 2019.
  3. ^ "P2PModels: Decentralized Blockchain-based Organizations for Bootstrapping the Collaborative Economy". Retrieved 8 December 2019.
  4. ^ Fernández, Jaime (30 January 2018). "Samer Hassan, nuevo ERC starting grant para la Complutense" [Samer Hassan, new ERC Starting Grant for the Complutense]. Tribuna Complutense. Archived from the original on 14 August 2020. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  5. ^ a b c 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. ^ a b "Samer Hassan at Real Colegio Complutense". Retrieved 8 December 2019.
  7. ^ "BOE.es - Documento BOE-A-2015-12976". www.boe.es. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  8. ^ "Samer Hassan at Surrey University". Retrieved 7 December 2019.
  9. ^ a b Miemis, Venessa (2 July 2011). "Contact Update: 2nd Round Scholarship Winners". emergent by design. Retrieved 23 December 2019.
  10. ^ "Berkman Center Announces 2015-2016 Community". 19 October 2015.
  11. ^ "Samer Hassan at Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard". Retrieved 7 December 2019.
  12. ^ a b "Translating Research into Online Tools to Increase Participation in Collaborative Communities". Berkman Klein Center. 20 July 2019. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  13. ^ "Move Commons". Medialab-Prado Madrid (in Spanish). Archived from the original on 10 December 2019. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  14. ^ a b "Behind Comunes | Comunes". comunes.org. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  15. ^ "Profile of Samer in Barrapunto". Barrapunto.com (Spanish Slashdot). 2 November 2015. Archived from the original on 10 June 2018. Retrieved 23 December 2019.
  16. ^ "Short CV". Samer Hassan. 30 November 2014. Retrieved 23 December 2019.
  17. ^ Gutiérrez, Bernardo (23 August 2012). "La era de la polinización cruzada". 20 Minutos. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  18. ^ Javelle, Eddie (15 March 2012). "L'OpenWeek, format d'animation pour les tiers-lieux et espaces de coworking". Future of Work, télétravail, coworking, freelances (in French). Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  19. ^ Workshop on Platform Cooperativism, retrieved 23 December 2019
  20. ^ Pinchen, Chris (17 April 2016). "FLOSS4P2P Workshop Agenda". P2Pvalue blog. Retrieved 23 December 2019.
  21. ^ "Drumbeat/events/Festival/program/move commons - MozillaWiki". wiki.mozilla.org. Retrieved 23 December 2019.
  22. ^ "What Is the Decentralized Web? 25 Experts Break it Down - Blog | iSchool@Syracuse". ischoolonline.syr.edu. 22 July 2016. Retrieved 23 December 2019.
  23. ^ Madrid, Facultad de Informática-Universidad Complutense de. "Facultad de Informática - Universidad Complutense de Madrid". web.fdi.ucm.es (in Spanish). Retrieved 23 December 2019.
  24. ^ "Universidad Complutense de Madrid". www.ucm.es. Retrieved 23 December 2019.
  25. ^ "Sci-FdI 1 | Ficha | Biblioteca | La Tercera Fundación". tercerafundacion.net. Retrieved 23 December 2019.
  26. ^ "BUCM :: Sci·Fdi:Revista de ciencia ficción :: Biblioteca Complutense". webs.ucm.es. Retrieved 23 December 2019.
  27. ^ "The Commons Collaborative Economy Explodes in Barcelona". 21 April 2016. Retrieved 7 December 2019.
  28. ^ CAPS2015 - Samer Hassan's interview, retrieved 10 December 2019
  29. ^ a b c "Can Blockchain Facilitate the Governance of Commons-oriented Communities?". 5 December 2018. Retrieved 8 December 2019.
  30. ^ a b "A substantial boost for easily and safely producing new online apps". Retrieved 8 December 2019.
  31. ^ "Distributed technologies to bootstrap the sharing economy". 30 April 2019. Retrieved 8 December 2019.
  32. ^ "Reinventing the Collaborative Economy with Blockchain-driven Democratic Organizations". 30 November 2018. Retrieved 8 December 2019.
  33. ^ Hassan, Samer; Filippi, Primavera De (20 April 2021). "Decentralized Autonomous Organization". Internet Policy Review. 10 (2). doi:10.14763/2021.2.1556. ISSN 2197-6775. S2CID 235559086.
  34. ^ "Steal this Show with Samer Hassan". Retrieved 8 December 2019.
  35. ^ "P2Pvalue. Decentralized technologies to support digital commons". Retrieved 8 December 2019.
  36. ^ "Agent-Based Social Modeling and Simulation with Fuzzy Sets". Retrieved 8 December 2019.
  37. ^ "Samer Hassan at Digital Social Innovation Fair". 3 April 2018. Retrieved 8 December 2019.
  38. ^ "Samer Hassan at Real Colegio Complutense".
  39. ^ "Samer Hassan - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  40. ^ "Injecting Data into Simulation: Can Agent-Based Modelling Learn from Microsimulation?". videolectures.net. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  41. ^ "MOVE COMMONS: Labeling, opening and connecting social initiatives". Retrieved 8 December 2019.
  42. ^ 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.
  43. ^ 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. Retrieved 8 December 2019.
  44. ^ 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. Retrieved 8 December 2019.
  45. ^ Hassan, Samer; De Filippi, Primavera. "Reputation and Quality Indicators to improve Community Governance". Retrieved 8 December 2019.
  46. ^ Rozas, David; Tenorio-Fornés, Antonio; Díaz-Molina, Silvia; Hassan, Samer (26 March 2021). "When Ostrom Meets Blockchain: Exploring the Potentials of Blockchain for Commons Governance". SAGE Open. 11 (1): 215824402110025. doi:10.1177/21582440211002526. ISSN 2158-2440.
  47. ^ "March2017 - Incubator Wiki". wiki.apache.org. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  48. ^ "Collaboration that doesn't give others a license to distribute your stuff". Horizon: the EU Research & Innovation magazine. Archived from the original on 9 September 2017. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  49. ^ "Una app para involucrar a más gente en proyectos colaborativos - El salmón contracorriente". www.elsalmoncontracorriente.es (in Spanish). Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  50. ^ "Teem". Teem. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  51. ^ "European Commission: CORDIS: News and Events: A substantial boost for easily and safely producing new online apps". cordis.europa.eu. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  52. ^ Público (8 December 2016). "Democracia radical a golpe de app". Público (in Spanish). Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  53. ^ Haste, Rough (23 April 2017). "Notes on "How P2P Will Save the World"". RoughHaste. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  54. ^ "JetPad". jetpad.net. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  55. ^ "SwellRT: Facilitating decentralized real-time collaboration". crcs.seas.harvard.edu. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  56. ^ Juste, Abel 'Akronix' Serrano. "WikiChron - Welcome". wikichron.science. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  57. ^ "Wikichron". wikipapers.referata.com. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  58. ^ Serrano, Abel; Arroyo, Javier; Hassan, Samer (2018). "Participation Inequality in Wikis" (PDF). 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. S2CID 51867176.
  59. ^ Presenting WikiChron: A tool to visualize collaboration in wikis., MediaWiki official Youtube channel, retrieved 10 December 2019
  60. ^ "Decentralized Science". decentralized.science. Archived from the original on 10 December 2019. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  61. ^ Tenorio-Fornés, Antonio; Jacynycz, Viktor; Llop-Vila, David; Sánchez-Ruiz, Antonio; Hassan, Samer (8 January 2019). 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. S2CID 92988902.
  62. ^ Tenorio-Fornés, Ámbar; Tirador, Elena Pérez; Sánchez-Ruiz, Antonio A.; Hassan, Samer (1 November 2021). "Decentralizing science: Towards an interoperable open peer review ecosystem using blockchain". Information Processing & Management. 58 (6): 102724. doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2021.102724. ISSN 0306-4573.
  63. ^ "LEDGER selects 16 human-centric projects working on decentralised technologies to enter its Venture Builder programme". Ledger: European Commission NGI Programme. Archived from the original on 10 December 2019. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  64. ^ 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; Sitek, Paweł; Nielsen, Izabela E.; García García, Julián A.; Bajo, Javier (eds.). Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence, 13th International Conference. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing. Vol. 474. Springer International Publishing. pp. 403–411. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-40162-1_44. ISBN 978-3-319-40162-1.
  65. ^ "Submissions". Triple Canopy. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  66. ^ 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., Figueras Aguilar, A. (2020). Polvora A, Hakami A, Bol E (eds.). 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.
  67. ^ Lobe, Von Adrian (8 April 2018). "The dangers of the crypto-polar utopia (translated from German)". Süddeutsche Zeitung (in German). ISSN 0174-4917. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  68. ^ Samer Hassan - Interview at DSIFair2018, retrieved 10 December 2019
  69. ^ "Blockchains: Distributed ledgers but centrally controlled processes?". American Enterprise Institute - AEI. 10 June 2019. Retrieved 24 July 2021.
  70. ^ "Samer Hassan". Digital Future Society. 14 October 2019. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  71. ^ "Annenberg-Oxford: Creative Approaches to Media Challenges" (PDF). Annenberg-Oxford Media Policy Summer Institute Program. 2018. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  72. ^ López, Genoveva (22 April 2019). "Who owns the collaborative economy? (translated from Spanish)". El Salto (in Spanish). Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  73. ^ "Decentralizing Power and Value with P2P Models | Berkman Klein Center". cyber.harvard.edu. 9 July 2021. Retrieved 24 July 2021.
  74. ^ Hassan, Samer (8 December 2020). "Toward a Digital Economy That's Truly Collaborative, Not Exploitative". The Reboot. Retrieved 24 July 2021.
  75. ^ López, Genoveva; Lorite, Álvaro. "NFT, ¿ángel o demonio en el mundo del arte digital?". www.elsaltodiario.com (in Spanish). Retrieved 24 July 2021.
  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 Spanish). Eldiario.es. 2019.
  77. ^ "Elena Martinez and Silvia Díaz of P2P Models on Blockchain, Feminism and Affective P2P". 31 July 2018. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
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  79. ^ "Talks on Technology Science (ToTS) and Topics in Privacy (TIP) - Data Privacy Lab". Talks on Technology Science. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
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  81. ^ "Samer_Hassan 2017 09 15-EconCS_Seminar-". SEAS video. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  82. ^ Miliband, Ed; Lloyd, Geoff (30 July 2018). "#45: BLOCKCHAIN PARTY: Can it be a force for good?". Reasons to be cheerful. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  83. ^ "Publications". P2P Models. Retrieved 20 April 2024.
  84. ^ a b "About". P2P Models. Retrieved 20 April 2024.
  85. ^ "Oficina Europea de I+D | Universidad Complutense de Madrid". oficinaeuropea.ucm.es. Retrieved 20 April 2024.
  86. ^ "Jobs in P2PModels". P2P Models. Retrieved 20 April 2024.
  87. ^ "The criteria we use to choose a case study in P2P Models". P2P Models. 1 April 2020. Retrieved 20 April 2024.
  88. ^ "Samer Hassan's Twitter". X (Twitter). Retrieved 20 April 2024.
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