Autonomous Knowledge Curation

Overview

Going back to what the role of science is, a major limitation of our approach was that we only focused on the researchers, i.e. the stakeholders who actively participate to maximize the science objective function. Why is this approach limited? Because the good that comes from maximizing the objective function of science doesn’t take shape in the research, but rather in how that research impacts the lives of everyone, how it affects the technologies we use, how it affects education, etc. In essence, an open science community, on top of enabling scientists to conduct research, should maximize scientific engagement. Scientific engagement leads to faster adoption of current research (or integration of existing knowledge assets), and it leads to an expansion of the scientific community itself (think of the role of popular science writers in onboarding people to science).

Parameters

This model adds a new ResearchProject class.

ResearchProject has the following attributes:

• name

• creator (the ResearcherAgent)

• value (corresponds to the funding the researcher received for it)

• impact (initialized to a value from 0-10)

• integration (value from 0-1)

• novelty (value from 0-1)

• engagement (unbounded).

Behavior

This model is an iteration of the public funding model that adds a CommunityAgent whose purpose is to maximize community engagement. A CommunityAgent is rewarded for engaging with the knowledge markets by the DAOTreasuryAgent.

The ResearchProject allows for tracking new metrics such as academic lineage, how different research projects are related to each other, and more (although most of these metrics are currently work in progress). In the current simulation, the CommunityAgent randomly interacts with a ResearchProject from the available pool, which increases that particular project’s engagement and impact, further interactions might be possible in the future.

Note that this expansion of the simulation required additional functionality to the tsp commands, which currently break all simulations of the previous models not using ResearchProject. If anyone wants to run the previous simulations, just retrieve an earlier commit.

Limitations

This is the highest resolution model currently available in DARC-SPICE. Its development is ongoing and future work will focus on adding more complexity to the agents' interaction. In its current form, it is very similar to the hybrid market structures model.

Further Reading