Barnabé Monnot
Research scientist @ Robust Incentives Group, Ethereum Foundation.
Research in algorithmic game theory, large systems and cryptoeconomics with a data-driven approach.
News
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04/02/2020: I joined SUTD’s Master in Urban Science and Planning Policy as Adjunct Lecturer, to teach the course of Computational Urban Analytics for a semester.
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01/01/2020: I joined the Ethereum Foundation as a research scientist in the newly-formed Robust Incentives Group. The team will explore mechanism design and protocol security from the standpoint of algorithmic game theory and economics, in the context of blockchains (in particular, Ethereum…)
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07/12/2019: On November 16th, I joined a team at Yale-NUS in the Open Climate Collabathon, held in various places around the world over two weeks. We worked out an incentive system to motivate accurate data reporting, with modules providing a secure environment for whistleblowers to report corrupted data, analysing actor commitments and checking commitment fulfillment on private, encrypted data. See more details here! We went on to share the most innovative approach award with another team, who worked on consumer disclosure and sustainable supply chains. Our work was presented during the UNFCCC COP25 by Ying Tong and Angel.
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04/07/2019: I attended the 20PoA conference, celebrating 20 years of Price of Anarchy since E. Koutsoupias and C. Papadimitriou’s paper, Worst-Case Equilibria. It was held in TU Creta, near the beautiful city of Chania. I presented a poster on our work linking inequality and Price of Anarchy, which was also discussed during Christos’s keynote.
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04/06/2019: I defended my PhD thesis today, Efficiency, regret and inequality in decentralised systems! It takes a look at the behaviour of a large real system, Singapore’s mobility network, and provides models, experiments and data about the impact of decentralisation on effiency and inequality. Find a Twitter thread here where I expand on my oral presentation and my final thesis submission.
Latest posts
(Partially) Explained Casper CBC specs — Parts one and two
Scaling blockchains in a provably secure manner is an urgent problem. I recently published a two-part post on Medium related to the latest Casper CBC specs. It has visuals to make sure it is clear and is my attempt at describing the often complex issue of consensus. Read on and let me know what you think! [Part one] [Part two] More...
Efficient markets for urban design
Taipei, in an effort to “green” the city after decades of industrialisation and develop alternative modes of transportation, has steadily built a large network of bicycle lanes. The more awkward ones run on parts of sidewalk with two simple parallel lines delineating the space, but the more scenic paths are to be found along its rivers. Though flanked on every side by turbulent expressways and large interchanges feeding into long bridges, once an opening below the motorised hell is passed, you finally access the riverbeds. There, a sinewy bicycle path, following the curves of the stream, connects you from the city to mangroves and picturesque green spaces where herons and fishermen coexist. More...
Random walks in Singapore
After four years of roaming around Singapore, I have collected a few addresses by neighbourhoods. I suggest you put markers on Google Maps for all these points, to see how they can be made into walks and where to stop to eat. Each neighbourhood is usually accessible by MRT and a lot of them are in the same area, so can easily be walked from one to the other. More...
The pedestrian flow
Cities may come in all sizes and shapes, cultures and habits, histories and topologies but still remains one seemingly common denominator across all: the pedestrian. Yes, people in New York walk faster (but slower than Singapore, apparently, though the study discounts pedestrians using their phone while walking, which accounts for 90% (data mine, totally objective) of everyone), people in Bangalore seamlessly move from sidewalk to the road, people in Hong Kong know to arrange themselves in queues in congested areas, but even these specificities can be explained away by the particular conditions in which they happen. More...
The Taiwan metro etiquette
I have skipped a week in my year of writing but will make it up now with some stray thoughts. More...