Network Research
These are the main projects we’re currently working on. With the support of a broader community, we’re either driving or helping to drive these projects to their full potential. While each project supports collaboration in a different way, together they intend to provide revolutionary improvements in coordination.
Our Mission
Network Research identifies and uses leverage points within science as a system to align researchers, builders, and funders.
Our team explores and creates new mechanisms for incentivizing and supporting public goods creation in the areas of science and technology. Our goal is to create high-impact collaboration opportunities for researchers, funders, and builders.
Network Research approaches science holistically as a system: we aim to develop a better understanding of incentives in academic and industrial science, and to integrate this understanding into mechanism and tool design.
Projects
Our current projects are centered on:
- driving research into systems for distributed coordination & collaboration
- developing & deploying improved value attribution & value capture mechanisms for
science
- developing & deploying improved tools for aligning researchers and research funders, and
identifying & de-risking funding opportunities, and
- driving adoption of high-impact metaresearch tools
Discourse Graphs
Discourse Graphs are a simple and powerful infrastructure for knowledge synthesis and communication — the natural operating system for a cloud laboratory. Learn more about Discourse Graphs.
Research Roadmaps
Research Roadmaps are a knowledge discovery, sharing, and coordination tool empowering experts and aspiring experts in a variety of fields to share latent knowledge and find leverage points in a research network. Read more about our work to make research roadmaps scalable and computable here: Learn more about Research Roadmaps.
Research Directions & Open Problems
Our longer-term goals depend on having a better understanding of value flows and value capture in scientific systems, as well as the unique incentives in play and the available mechanisms to leverage these incentives.
We’d like to engage the broader public goods community in thinking about these questions: to that end, we’ve drafted a (non-exhaustive!) list of some of the more interesting research problems we’ve developed or discovered:
New approaches to choosing the right funding mechanism and calculating research RoI
We seek better methods for determining which funding mechanism (grant, prize, bounty, impact certificate) is appropriate for a particular research initiative, and better methods for calculating the return on a research investment appropriate to each funding mechanism.
A theory of regenerative cryptoeconomics
We wish to understand the conditions under which the funding of goods that create value for the public with no immediate value capture mechanism attached can be made sustainable.
Conflict resolution and merging processes for graphs
We want to make human-created and curated graphs (e.g. knowledge graphs, discourse graphs, dataset graphs) machine-readable and enable advanced queries. To that end, we seek general approaches to share, merge, and perform conflict resolution over related but independently-generated graphs.
Creating a relationship coefficient for linked datasets
We seek a set of design principles for linking original datasets with their computed or manipulated descendants in a way that makes their provenance and relatedness clear: a relationship coefficient for datasets.
Approaches to attributing value across a network a scientific contributors
Related to value attribution in a network of contributors, we seek to create robust mechanism for assigning credit to the contributors to discovery or innovation lying downstream of their research efforts. How do we trace verifiable paths between early contributions and downstream impact? We believe that this Open Problem may be generalized to value attribution questions in Web3 and scientific networks, where we require robust & actionable results in multipolar systems/under imperfect consensus.
Resources
Network Research’s interests are found at the intersection of metaresearch and public goods. Visit PL Research to learn more.
Events calendar coming soon!
Our Team
Karola Kirsanow
Team Lead
Raymond Cheng
Startup Operator
Silvia Bessa
Research Program Manager
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