Prof Burkhard Schafer part of new £10 million AI and Blockchain Centre

An ambitious new £10 million research centre that will look to reshape the future of the digital economy with the help of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology, has been launched.

The University of Surrey, together with the University of Edinburgh and Digital Catapult, is establishing the Centre for the Decentralised Digital Economy (DECaDE), thanks to a £4 million award from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and £6 million investment from industrial partners.

Prof Burkhard Schafer, Professor of Computational Legal Theory at Edinburgh Law School, will lead the research strand on governance and regulation in the decentralised digital economy. The aim is to model what good governance looks like in this new economy, drawing upon computational legal theory to develop patterns for how the actions of individuals and organisations should be regulated to ensure safety and stability.

“Law has always favoured hierarchical structures with clear choke points to get regulatory traction," said Prof Schafer. "Decentralised systems pose a number of unique challenges for the law, but also allow us to think about regulation in new ways. How can we involve users more meaningfully in the governance of these systems? How can we protect worker’s rights in the decentralised economy, how does collective action look like in this world? What role does the law play to facilitate new forms of artistic co-creation in these networks? The next years will see crucial design decisions being made in buildings these infrastructures, and we must ensure that they are fit for our aspirations of a more just, sustainable and fair economy.”

Data-driven innovation is transforming every sector of our digital economy into a de-centralised marketplace; accommodation (AirBnb), transportation (Uber), logistics (Deliveroo), user-generated vs. broadcast content in the creative industries (YouTube). We are witnessing an inexorable shift from centralised control by large organisations toward a decentralised economy in which anyone is a potential producer and consumer.

Prof John Collomosse, Professor of Computer Vision at the Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing and Principal Investigator/Director of DECaDE, said: "In a short space of time, we have seen our economy transformed by digital technologies, offering everyone the opportunity to be a producer, seller and direct consumer of services. Whether you are buying a sofa from a private seller on Amazon or you are ordering a takeaway on Just Eat, these peer-to-peer interactions are liberating. They are a significant change to how business was conducted only a few years ago. 

"However, the platforms on which these digital services are built follow the same centralised, classic infrastructure of the past. We are standing on the cusp of a second digital economy disruption wave, led by the emergence of AI and distributed ledger technologies. We believe that the governance of these platforms and the data that powers them will soon sit with individuals and decentralised organisations."

DECaDE will help make sure that the emerging decentralised digital economy profits all parties involved by developing insights that define a new model of work and value creation. The centre will focus its research into state-of-the-art AI tools and distributed ledger technologies and investigate how they can be used to help drive decentralised innovations in the digital economy. 

DECaDE is one of six research centres across the UK announced as part of a £29 million investment by UK Research and Innovation.