Research

OpenLab is built on a culture of creativity and experimentation. We incubate research that doesn’t fit into the existing boxes and encourage our affiliates to blend disciplines, to reimagine the world, and to take on the big, impactful work that requires significant risk tolerance. Our projects are not necessarily chosen for their obvious utility or for their quantifiable outputs—instead, we look for research that is driven by a desire to build something completely new. Our only requirements are curiosity and academic rigor.

Current Research Pillars

01

02

03

04

Decentralized Systems

Building new technologies to fight against a dystopian future, focusing on privacy, governance, blockchains, and other resilience infrastructure

  • As DAOs and other decentralized coordination structures mature, new governance mechanisms become increasingly important to incentivize consensus “good” behavior, disincentivize consensus “bad” behavior, and reduce negative externalities. Governing a decentralized protocol—or, alternatively, using a decentralized protocol to govern groups of individuals—is a complex process with the potential to rewrite the rules of organizational management.

    Our DAO Governance group draws on economics, law, computer science, and business to engage in both theoretical research and practical pilots. Our ultimate goal is to conceptualize and prototype new governance mechanisms.

  • Blockchains are a broad class of decentralized technology that have significant transformative potential. While most of the mainstream use cases have centered around digital finance, the concrete applications of blockchains in the real world is relatively under-explored. OpenLab believes that the promise of blockchains and decentralized systems goes far beyond investing and trading.

    Our Applied Blockchains group examines how, for example, hardware or blockchain-adjacent software (cryptography, DAOs, etc.) might push decentralization further into public life. We experiment with injecting blockchains into real-world settings, as well as prototype new methods for cryptocurrency and DAOs to interface with the general public. Underpinning this research is a deep concern with the rising threat of authoritarianism—we believe that decentralized technologies offer one of the more promising solutions for avoiding a dystopian future.

Society and Algorithms

Examining societal structures through a technological lens, with a particular focus on Artificial Intelligence, coordination mechanisms, and building safe systems

  • Modern society only functions because we have systems that offer safety guarantees for things like airplanes, medicines, and cybersecurity protocols. Today’s AI systems, however, offer no such guarantees—instead, they probabilistically generate outputs that maximize an arbitrary utility function. This utility function can be retargeted, but it can also be imperceptibly compromised by biased input data or malicious actors, leading to worst-case scenario outcomes.

    Our AI Safety group is building specification generation tools that help users specify desired properties of AI outputs as enforceable constrains, as well as proof generators to formally verify the solutions. Upon success, these tools produce AI with guaranteed safe capabilities. If they fail, they produce AI systems that do nothing. This is in contrast to common safety approaches in the wider AI community that risk creating opaque, malfunctioning safety systems whose dangers are hard to spot until it is too late to avoid harm.

    We are starting with the formal verification of Rust-based smart contracts under the assumption that specifications can be a target of governance, allowing institutions to scale with AI, rather than needing to trust the AI systems themselves.

  • Social choice is the study of how groups should (and should not) make collective decisions. It involves topics such as simple elections, but also more complex deliberative decision making tasks, as well as behavioral, strategic, and group polarization aspects of collective decision making. Social choice is relevant to decentralized blockchain-based systems in two important respects: first, in terms of the governance mechanisms of the decentralized system; and second, in terms of the actual consensus algorithm that leads to block creation. 

    Our primary research focuses on refining an abstracted blockchain model into a class of mechanisms that provide different trade-offs in efficiency (i.e., whether the most important transactions get included in a block), revenue (for block proposers), and fairness (to both transactions and proposers). Additionally, we study governance mechanisms with native dispute resolution.

Arts and Letters

Exploring the future of art and philosophy by applying the humanities to questions typically assumed to have “hard science” answers—and vice versa

  • Theology and ethics are often artificially framed as counterproductive in the context of scientific advancement, meaning that these two fields rarely work side-by-side in any meaningful way. OpenLab directly rejects this assumption in favor of a framework in which theology and ethics influence and inform science and engineering, and science and engineering likewise empower theology and ethics. What does an engineering approach to spirituality look like? Possibly more interesting, what does a faith-based approach to engineering look like?

    Our Ethics and Theology group is interested in advancing metaphysical research by taking inspiration from other disciplines. The traditional department-based university structure has kept these two fields apart for hundreds of years; our hope is to permanently change the way both operate in the world.

  • One of the most insidious threats facing US citizens today is the slow, nearly imperceptible creep towards authoritarianism. If history is any indication, we ought to be extremely wary of technologies deployed under the banner of public safety or general convenience. OpenLab is invested in considering emerging technologies and practices—from facial recognition and automatic license plate readers to the larger economy of surveillance capitalism—and asking: Does the worst-case scenario cost more than immediate safety and convenience is worth? 

    Our Resistance Culture group explores cultural artifacts—fashion, art, music, and the like—as tools for adding friction into the surveillance economy. Our ultimate goal is to leverage the built-in plausible deniability of cultural engagement as a mechanism for slowing a potential descent into tyranny.

Human Prototyping

Building the unglamorous, low-profit prototypes that improve human lives, with an eye towards elevating disadvantaged groups and fighting inequality

  • Human health is a broad and fascinating area of study, ranging from concerns about day-to-day comfort all the way to the bleeding edge of longevity research. Unfortunately, a major barrier in this field is the lack of access to large, diverse datasets that capture the complex interactions between—to name just a few factors—genetics, environment, socioeconomic status, and lifestyle over time. Without access to this data, researchers struggle to make the key connections required to unlock the secrets behind healthy aging.

    Our Health Engineering group focuses on democratizing access to this information, through technological or social engineering. We build tools to better interact with public health datasets (such as the NIH’s All Of Us database) and leverage citizen science to fill in the gaps that modern medicine doesn’t currently have the bandwidth to fill.

  • Progress is powered by incentives; the reality is that some projects lack built-in incentives. Non-monetizable public goods, for example, are low incentive, as are social initiatives that do not end in a product or publication. Often, the time required to construct even lightweight versions of these goods or services is outweighed by the risk of failure or lack of profit margin. As a result, the world is missing important pieces of infrastructure. 

    Starting from first principles, our Social Redesign group reimagines these critical but overlooked human systems and builds minimum viable product (MVP) versions. Our hope is that by undertaking the early exploratory research and proof-of-concept modeling, other groups will face lesser risks and be able to pick up where we leave off