Ehud Shapiro

Professor Ehud Shapiro is a multidisciplinary scientist, entrepreneur, artist, and political activist who is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science and Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics (Department of Mathematics and Data Science Institute). With international reputation, he has made contributions to many scientific disciplines, establishing a long-term research agenda for each by asking basic questions and offering a first step towards answering them. These include: how to computerize the process of scientific discovery, by providing an algorithmic interpretation to Karl Popper's methodology of conjectures and refutations; how to automate program debugging, by algorithms for fault localization; how to unify parallel, distributed, and systems programming with a high-level logic-based programming language; how to use the Web as a foundation for social networking; how to devise molecular computers that can function as smart programmable drugs; how to uncover the human cell lineage tree, via single-cell genomics; and how to support digital democracy, by devising an alternative architecture to the digital realm. Shapiro was also an early internet entrepreneur and a proponent of global digital democracy. He is a winner of two ERC Advanced Grants.

At LSE, Shapiro focuses on developing and deploying the Grassroots architecture, which offers a novel conceptual, mathematical, technological, and implementation framework for equitable and inclusive digital platforms, as an alternative to today’s extractive and wealth-concentrating global platforms. The design includes three interconnected grassroots platforms: social networking, enabling communities to form sovereign peer-to-peer social networks protected from AI manipulation through cryptographic authentication; grassroots cryptocurrencies, where mutual trust generates liquidity without external capital, banking the unbanked; and scalable democratic digital governance through sortition-based assemblies of federated communities. The research aims to provide mathematical and computational foundations for a digital infrastructure that would offer implementable inclusive and equitable alternatives to current extractive global platforms.

The science supporting his work at LSE, while published broadly, is collectively available on the arXiv. Background on Shapiro can be found on Wikipedia.

The science supporting his work at LSE, while published broadly, is collectively available on the arXiv: https://arxiv.org/search/?query=Shapiro%2C+Ehud&searchtype=author

Background on Shapiro can be found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehud_Shapiro