David
Hales
I am a senior research
fellow at The
Open
University in the UK. I do research at the overlap between
computer science and social science. I am interested in open
distributed systems that include both machine and human agencies
where the imposition of central control is not an option
and one can't rely on the "invisible hands" of orthodox economic
(or
game) theory. A synthesis is required between new kinds of social
theory applicable to the artificial domain and distributed
self-organising systems programming. Such a synthesis could transform, not just
technology but,
human societies in
profound
ways.
I have explored these
ideas through evolutionary cooperation theory, complex networks, agent-based modelling and
peer-to-peer systems. Recently I have become interested in how open
distributed systems might provide novel ways to supportfinancial functionswithout the need for
centralised
institutions such as banks. I am also interested in the application
of
new approaches to collective coordinationthat focus on social interaction
rather than traditional economics-type incentive mechanisms.
Rahman, R., Vinko, T., Hales, D., Pouwelse, J. and Sips,
H.
(2011). Design Space Analysis for Modeling Incentives in
Distributed
Systems. ACM
SIGCOMM 2011. PDF.
Hales, D., (2010) Rationality meets the Tribe: Recent
Models of
Cultural Group Selection. In Mollona, E., (ed) Computational
Analysis
of Firms’ Organization and Strategic Behaviour. Routledge. PDF.
Hales, D., Rahman, R., Zhang, B., Meulpolder M., and
Pouwelse, J.
(2009) BitTorrent or BitCrunch: Evidence of a credit squeeze
in
BitTorrent? Proceedings of the 5th IEEE Collaborative
Peer-to-Peer
Systems (COPS) Workshop. PDF.
Hales, D. & Arteconi, S. (2006) SLACER: A
Self-Organizing
Protocol for Coordination in P2P Networks. IEEE Intelligent
Systems,
21(2):29-35. PDF.
Hales, D. & Edmonds, B. (2005) Applying a
socially-inspired
technique (tags) to improve cooperation in P2P Networks.
IEEE
Transactions in Systems, Man and Cybernetics - Part A:
Systems and
Humans, 35(3):385-395. PDF.
Selected Talks
Hales, D. (2011) The social transformation and your role
in it.
Invited talk - PhD in progress workshop at the ECCS2011 conference,
Vienna, 14th
Sept. PDF.
Halas, D. (2011) Denationalising Money: can quality
emerge?
Presented at the NESS
workshop at
the ECCS2011
conference, Vienna,
14th Sept. PDF.
Abstract of
talk PDF.
Hales, D. (2011) The Socio-Economics of P2P Systems.
Invited talk
- Warwick Business School Exective MBA programme, Warwick,
UK, 16th
June. PDF.
Hales, D. (2011) The Socio-Economics of Pervasive Systems.
Invited talk - EPFL Summer Research Institute, Lausanne,
Switzerland,
14th June. PDF.
Hales, D. (2010) Towards a Quality Financial Commons?
Invited
talk - Quality
Commons
Workshop, Paris, January 2010. PDF.
Position statement PDF.