We’ve been hard at work since the public Pre-Launch. We’ve staffed up new team members from all over the world. We’ve set detailed plans for the tech, community and partnerships. Now we’d like to introduce some of our team members to you, in a celebration of the diversity and transparency of Team Ocean.

Head of Product and Research Dr. Dimitri De Jonghe on micro-electronics, streamlining development, and achieving immortality by uploading the human brain to the blockchain.

What is your professional background? Did you study something in a related field?

For my Masters, I studied micro-electronics engineering in my home country of Belgium; essentially creating computer chips. I furthered that with a PhD in applied Machine Learning to the design of computer chips; robust modeling of analog and mixed-signal circuits. In 2013 I started iterating with Trent McConaghy on ascribe.io (intellectual property on the Bitcoin blockchain), then followed the project towards BigchainDB (a blockchain database) and finally to here to Ocean Protocol (a public intelligence network).

What do you do for Ocean Protocol?

As the job title says, I am in charge of defining the product that is Ocean, which also includes research and software architecture creation. I also do a lot of public outreach and community education through speaking at events, as well as authoring the occasional blog.

What do you like most about your work here?

I really enjoy the novelty in tech (“bleeding edge tech”) as well as the cross-domain thinking. It’s also pretty cool to have access to the smartest people in the space.

What are the biggest (professional) challenges you’re currently facing?

At the moment, definitely streamlining the process of growing freshly-formed ideas into exact specifications which can ultimately be implemented by developers and the community. To address this challenge, we have launched a lightweight governance structure for making enhancement proposals. This has helped a lot.

What does the flat hierarchy mean to you? And open-source?

A flat hierarchy means that our product is a direct reflection of our organization. We reach consensus on problems, and incentivize team members to come through with clever solutions. Open source means that contributions lead to a strong, anti-fragile network. Security through transparency.

What is your favourite use case for Ocean Protocol?

First Place: Natural resource mapping, prediction and maintenance. Can we use crowd intelligence to make people more aware of the global state of the world?

Second Place: Universal recommender- a recommendation engine that prioritizes your digital life, based on all of your entire digital history. Fully privacy-preserving and trained on the entirety of human experience.

Tell us something fun about you :)

I’ve created a few board games like “QBenga” and “Pimp My Street Cred”.

Any final thoughts?

Decentralized Intelligence: The only way humans can upload their brains onto a more efficient substrate, and thereby ultimately achieve immortality.