SEED event brings Blockchain and beyond to Davos

Validity Labs in partnership with ETH Library Lab, an innovation initiative of the ETH Library and the Library of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is organizing a Scientific Ecosystem Experimentation with Decentralization (SEED) event over four days. The event seeks to provide a platform for demonstrating the benefits of blockchain technology for the research infrastructure, in particular for supporting scientific collaboration, early sharing and efficient allocation of funding for research.

The SEED event will include interdisciplinary keynotes, blockchain training, lectures on science economics, patents and intellectual property, research funding, evaluation systems and communication in the academic environment. Participants will conduct experiments to determine what role blockchain and distributed technologies will play to improve research infrastructure, open up science and create more collaboration between science and business researchers.

After the two-day symposium, the participants will join forces and use the lessons learned to identify novel applications for decentralized technologies in the research infrastructure. The best projects will be developed during the incubator by a team of developers into disruptive open source prototypes.

“The economy relies long-term on the well-being and fast development in science, which is a foundation for new technologies. Therefore, we will discuss unsolved problems and collaboratively ideate how one of the hottest cutting-edge technologies can be utilized in the scientific environment,” says Aleksandra Sokolowska, SEED project lead.

Startups are invited to attend
The target audience for the event are researchers, librarians, funding agencies, publishers, technologists, policy-makers, and executives. Individuals from outside the research environment but are interested in entering the blockchain, and related technologies may also register to participate. 

For potential entrepreneurs and startups that are looking for inspiration, SEED provides the opportunity to explore the technologies for their own projects. The lessons learned can be translated into blockchain-business use case identification in any other field.

A detailed program of the symposium and Think tank is available on the website.