Meet the Esprezzo Advisory Board: Dr. Mihaela Ulieru

This early blockchain pioneer is working to push the current economic wave in favor of the 99%

Esprezzo Advisor Dr. Mihaela Ulieru

As we continue to improve our blockchain middleware, Esprezzo is also building out an advisory team of innovators and influencers who have been crucial to the blockchain and crypto movements in Boston and around the world.

You may be familiar with some of these individuals, but we’d like to provide you a formal introduction anyways.

The first member of the Esprezzo advisory board we’d like to introduce is Dr. Mihaela Ulieru. With roughly 20 years of experience in distributed systems, Mihaela is a champion of leveraging technology to spur economic development, and was responsible for the World Economic Forum recognizing blockchain as a Top 10 Emerging Technology in 2016.

Without further ado, meet Dr. Mihaela Ulieru.

What aspects of Esprezzo encouraged you to join the company as an advisor?

I see Esprezzo as a first step towards democratizing access to blockchain by enabling “the rest of us coders” to write applications on this amazing innovation in decentralization-enabling infrastructures. This will accelerate the pace of development on blockchain applications which is crucial to turn the tide once and for all in favor of the decentralized, sovereign, equitable world aimed at by Satoshi.

How would you describe your journey and experience within the blockchain and crypto communities?

Since I finished my PhD work in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) in the mid-90s, I began championing the area of distributed intelligent systems, which was at the time considered a “fad” by the proponents of classical AI. I could not stop being amazed at the magic effects of swarms (be them insects, birds or schools of fish) that accomplished monumental tasks without central coordination. So I looked deeper into the mechanisms which governed decentralized systems and began implementing them — first into infrastructures for distributed manufacturing systems consisting of robotic machines that self-organized around particular tasks; then moving on to coordinate global supply chains of goods and services through software agents (autonomous software “capsules” working together like swarms of ants) and ultimately deploying “self-organizing security networks” able to respond in real time to unexpected emergency events.

From here the natural next step was to envision an infrastructure on which people could more effectively and equitably organize their work as well as their economic exchanges. So I began looking into how to redefine the centralized governance structures we currently have in place. While looking for solutions (together with peers from the distributed systems community), we encountered a dead end in the way communication infrastructures were deployed during the Internet era, and attempted to overcome these through various tricks, such as state machines — yet it was not an easy nor elegant way — which is why we had difficulty getting such distributed technologies to take flight in the real world.

As soon as the seminal Satoshi paper was published, we immediately realized the value of such an infrastructure with the properties of the Bitcoin blockchain and began researching intensely along those lines. This positioned me as a pioneer and champion in the blockchain community. I was involved early in research with the MIT Media Lab and invited to join pioneering movements such as The Windhover Transition, pushing blockchain technology when threats from all sides were made to ban it. I co-authored one of the first books and contributed to many others, while speaking around the world to support this new wave that opened windows towards a more equitable economy.

Esprezzo will accelerate the pace of development on blockchain applications which is crucial to turn the tide once and for all in favor of the decentralized, sovereign, equitable world aimed at by Satoshi.

Ultimately, I pushed blockchain to be included among the Top 10 Emerging Technologies by the World Economic Forum in 2016 — in spite of solid pushbacks from peers. With 2017 being undeniably and incontestably the “Year of the Blockchain” — with an incredible number of ICOs taking flight to revolutionize the way we live and work in a digital society — my fight was rewarded not only with the well deserved credibility for my opinions and advice, but also with the utmost reward of seeing my dearest dream come true with the advent of the new “token economy.”

In your opinion, what additional advances need to be made in order for decentralized network applications to bring about social and economic improvements?

The major breakthrough brought about by the Bitcoin blockchain was already a pivotal milestone which the distributed systems community was chasing for decades. Improvements to this initial innovation have and will continue to be made by the technical and advanced software expert community. Yet — in order to fulfill its promise of equitable access and democratize the rights which only the “haves” were enjoying before it — blockchain will have to become accessible to those without software expertise. I strongly believe that this will be the next breakthrough which will unleash another wave of applications finally turning around the current economic wave in favor of the “99%.”

Why did you decide to support companies such as LifeLink Inc., MyBit, and Sapien as an advisor?

All the companies which I advise (and there are many more than these you refer to here) are dedicated to the effort of shifting the power balance from the legacy centralized institutions which have proven to enable a gaming of the system which punishes honesty while rewarding corruption (a la 2008 financial crisis style). For example, LifeLink, through chatbots, aims at empowering patients struggling for their right to dignity and competent care in a medical system in which the doctor is supreme ruler and the pharma companies pushing their sales have made it impossible to reverse disastrous epidemics such as the addiction to opiates currently destroying so many lives in North America.

With a similar ethos, MyBit enables everyone to invest in any infrastructure anywhere in the world. So, a person from Germany donating a few hundred dollars can support a project setting up solar panels in rural Nigeria and get rewarded with their investment via smart contracts based proportionally on the value of the energy produced. Besides the noble cause of helping disadvantaged communities in rural Africa who would otherwise never been able to get the funding to access electricity, MyBit is also shifting the power balance in the investing community by enabling everyone access to projects they believe in. It’s also making the rules of the game as equitable as it gets, thus stopping the exclusivity in which investors with the deepest pockets were enjoying most.

Sapien — a “fake news free” social network — realizes a dream I always had about a meritocratic “eSociety” that filters the “fakeness” prevalent in how current social networks function by enabling people to validate opinions and evaluate contributions by their peers, and reward valuable contributions in “reputation tokens” which can be monetized.

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