UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM presents "Building a Bridge between Crypto and the Real Economy: Monetary Theory, Formal Specification, and Zero-Knowledge Proofs in the Cosmos Ecosystem" Dr. Paolo Dini (Informal Systems, Canada and LSE) 11 October 2023 13:00 -14:00 College Lane Campus Room 1A161 Everyone is Welcome to Attend Abstract: I am a researcher at Informal Systems (https://informal.systems/), one of the core developers of the Cosmos ecosystem (https://mapofzones.com) — a third-generation blockchain architecture. My work is deeply interdisciplinary and ranges from the political economy of monetary systems, to the design of better monetary models at different economic scales, to the formal specification of blockchain applications, and finally to the algebra of zero-knowledge proofs. In this talk I will give a very high-level overview of the evolution of blockchain architectures since Bitcoin, I will then introduce the monetary architecture that informs the work of my "Collaborative Finance" team within Informal (https://cofi.informal.systems/), I will spend some time outlining some of the work I have been doing to specify the requirements of our CoFi blockchain using Abstract State Machines (ASMs), TLA+, and Quint, a new language developed by Informal Systems, and will close with a few algebraic ideas underpinning modern zero-knowledge proof systems. Each of these topics could easily absorb a separate 1-hour presentation, but we thought it would be better to address a wider audience to give a sense of how different disciplinary topics related to computer science in different ways interact within a leading-edge R&D company like Informal Systems. Biography: Paolo was born in Italy in 1961 and moved to the US with his family at age 16. He received a PhD in Aerospace Engineering from Penn State in 1990. He taught undergraduate physics at Carleton College and St Olaf College, Minnesota, while consulting and researching in wind turbine aerodynamics. He then worked for a wearable computer company in Minnesota and continued working in hardware R&D at Philips Research Laboratories in the UK until 2001. He was then a research group leader at the MIT Media Lab Europe in Dublin. In 2003 he joined the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK), with which he retains an affiliation as a Senior Visiting Research Fellow. In 2012 He also joined the Computer Science Department at the University of Hertfordshire (UK), with which he retains an affiliation as Visiting Research Fellow. More recently, he has worked as an R&D consultant for the Sardex complementary currency 2016-19. In social science, Paolo is interested in studying social, economic, monetary, and political theory and how they apply to bottom-up socio-economic phenomena such as complementary currencies. His preferred applied field in social science is the role of collaborative finance tools such as mutual credit and obligation-clearing in (the political economy of) sustainable development. In Computer Science Paolo has worked on biocomputing and algebraic automata theory. He is very interested, although far from an expert, in Abstract State Machines as a mathematical specification and modelling methodology for software engineering. In physics and mathematics Paolo is interested in the study of symmetries, non-linear dynamical systems, abstract algebra (esp. group theory), and differential geometry. --------------------------------------------------- Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium http://cs-colloq.cs.herts.ac.uk