We are excited to welcome Sílvia Bessa to the Protocol Labs Research team. We asked Sílvia about her journey to Protocol Labs, the projects she will be working on, and her thoughts about future technological developments:

How did you decide to join Protocol Labs?

I believe that community-driven research is the best-known way to protect humanity’s knowledge from individual interests. Protocol Labs shares the same vision, which naturally spiked my interest in joining the team! Besides, the design of new incentive mechanisms to bridge research and product together, the promotion of cooperative yet autonomous nodes and organizations around a common building block, or the creation of innovative research optimization strategies, made it clear that Protocol Labs was the place to be for me! That is why I am the newest Research Program Manager. I certainly hope I can add bandwidth to the pre-existing efforts of PL research, and I cannot wait to have an impact on the mechanisms of research promotion or roadmap new initiatives inside the PL ecosystem.

What problems are you most interested in?

It is time time to optimize research itself. How can we “productize” scientific outcomes and create a steady revenue to fund both fundamental and disruptive research? How should we manage resources to captivate talent and create a propitious environment for scientific and technological research? What’s the best way to capture talented and driven individuals and promote people connection and alignment around a shared goal? How can we empower researchers to propose their own projects or explore personal bets as a means to create innovative science? I have a lot of questions, I hope I can pave the way to answer some of them.

What future technology are you most excited about?

Simply put, federated learning and privacy-preserving AI! I look at AI as a tremendous technology that might improve the general well-being of humanity. Therefore, it is paramount that we design the underlying technology and principles based on no-harm, fairness, and transparency.