17. Bianca Trovò: Ants-Review, rethinking peer review, and blockchain

May 14, 2021

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Bianca Trovò is a PhD student at Neurospin and Sorbonne Université, where she studies self-initiated movements. Recently, she is a developer of Ants-Review, a blockchain-based protocol for incentivising scientific peer review. In this conversation, we talk mainly about Ants-Review and I ask questions from the perspective of a scientist who isn't particularly familiar with blockchain and cryptography.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith. New conversations every other Friday. You can find the podcast on all podcasting platforms (e.g., Spotify, Apple/Google Podcasts, etc.).

Timestamps
0:00:10: How Ants-Review got started
0:14:07: So what's wrong with peer review (in its current form)?
0:26:14: Incentives in Ants-Review
0:40:02: Can people cheat on Ants-Review?
0:52:44: Will reviews on Ants-Review be many micro-reviews, rather than a few traditional reviews?
0:59:47: Why does Ants-Review need to be done in blockchain?
1:21:53: Academic articles as NFTs?
1:24:40: The future of Ants-Review
1:35:11: How can people contribute to Ants-Review (incl. quadratic funding)?
1:41:12: How easy is it to use Ants-Review?

Ants-Review links

https://twitter.com/antsreview
https://antsreview.substack.com/
Bianca's paper outlining Ants-Review: Trovò, B., & Massari, N. (2021). Ants-Review: A Privacy-Oriented Protocol for Incentivized Open Peer Reviews on Ethereum. In Euro-Par 2020: Parallel Processing Workshops (Vol. 12480, p. 18). Nature Publishing Group.
Video runthrough of Ants-Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXNpBpWQo60
Gitcoin Grant: https://gitcoin.co/grants/1628/an

Podcast links

Website: https://bjks.buzzsprout.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BjksPodcast

Bianca's links

Website: https://umr-lams.academia.edu/BiancaTrov%C3%B2
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=hoCMB_kAAAAJ
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bianca_troveaux

Ben's links

Website: www.bjks.blog/
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=-nWNfvcAAAAJ
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bjks_tweets

Additional references and links
3blue1brown video on bitcoin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4
Bianca's questions to Alexandra Elbakyan:
Q1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccqcY0YBfIw&t=1075s
Q2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccqcY0YBfIw&t=11129s
Buterin, Vitalik's blog post about quadratic funding: https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html
Game theory introduction: here is the brief and fun introduction to game theory that Bianca mentions at around the 47-minute mark: https://ncase.me/trust/