News Story

Kicking off the Decentralised Web

Jane Whild, Friday 17 Jan 2020

KMi researchers are among the leaders of a new group of academics, aDecentWeb, which aims to create a web where individuals and organisations remain in control.

John Domingue and Allan Third co-chaired the group’s first Decent(ralised) Web Symposium held in Vienna on 17th January 2020. The event was restricted to 200 attendees drawn from a range of research interests including decentralised infrastructures, multi-agent systems, collective intelligence, blockchains and the web, and cyber physical social systems.

KMi’s Anna De Liddo was a keynote speaker who presented her research on the technical factors influencing the design and uptake-of Collective Intelligence infrastructure.

Also giving a keynote was Ruben Verborgh of Ghent University. Ruben is part of the team working with Tim Berners Lee on Solid a decentralised data store. We are collaborating with the team in the Institute of Coding (IoC) on turning Solid stores in lifelong learning records.

Other invited talks were from Luc Desrosiers from IBM, Hugh Dickinson of The Open University, Julian Padget from University of Bath, Markus Sabadello CEO of Danube Tech, and Sarah Spiekermann of Vienna University.

The focus of Symposium was on decentralising infrastructures to allow users to feel empowered to manage their own digital assets. The event included quick flash talks and a poster session.

The group’s next event will be a Workshop at the Web Conference 2020 on 20-24 April in Tapai, Taiwan, where KMi’s Allan Third is on the Programme Committee.