From Dscience to Dtech

To identify scientific discoveries that can lead to meaningful technologies, and democratically vet their potential for breakthroughs.

We are scientists with doctoral degrees who have identified that most research, which could lead to a breakthrough tech, goes unnoticed.

All major leaps in our civilization have come from scientific discoveries evolving slowly into technological applications. This proposal aims at catalyzing this process and maximizing the chances that truly meaningful scientific discoveries are translated to new technologies through the involvement of scientists, engineers, technologists, business people, investors, creative minds, and dreamers. One of the main reasons for the slow pace of the development of true technological breakthroughs is the disconnect between all parties involved in the process that starts with scientific discovery. Developing a decentralized platform to pose discoveries found in the scientific literature and evaluate their potential, with contributions of all relevant players, will accelerate the development of breakthrough technologies.

The proposers are Alejandro Boscoboinik (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee), Anibal Boscoboinik (www.boscoboinik.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5090-7079),,) Octavio Furlong (Universidad Nacional de San Luis, Argentina) but we obviously need a lot more people to join us for this to work. We especially need developers (we are scientists) to even think of getting started.

We have the science part covered to some extent, through our experience and our network, but we really need the involvement of programmers, engineers, technologists, business people, creative minds, and Jules Verne's of today.

MAIN IDEA: Translation of Science to new Technologies

We propose to develop a platform where all the involved people contribute to the process of translating bodies of research into new technologies.

There are different ways of materializing this idea. The process proposed below is one of them:

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Step 1: People (it can be participating scientists but not necessarily) provide a summary of research they think has the potential for aiding in the development of new technology and links to related publications.

Step 2: A discussion takes place within the broad community in the platform to evaluate the potential of this presented research.

Step 3: If consensus is achieved between the participants that there is a real potential, a business plan is developed by the interested parties. If not, the research is shelved but available in case anyone wants to revisit the discussion in the future.

Step 4: The business plan is further evaluated by the involved parties, if consensus is achieved that the plan makes *economic sense, then the plan moves forward to be evaluated for **funding.

*Economic sense is not necessarily monetary, it could be a technology that does not generate monetary profit but it provides a greater good such as reducing poverty, reducing contamination, reducing global warming, add value to the ecosystem/Cardano, etc.

**A Fund needs to be generated to start the system, potentially a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), but the system will be sustainable if a percentage of the profit from the developed technologies goes back to Fund.

Step 5: If funding is approved, a team is assembled to execute the idea. This will involve registering a business and hiring people as needed. A plan with milestones upon which disbursement of funding is contingent is developed. This plan also needs to be discussed, evaluated, and approved.

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Starting this project requires people within the blockchain space, and with the potential long term vision of reaching beyond. A potential flow process of the platform was introduced in the previous section and could be first tested on a small scale. The first group needed to be involved in this is that of developers to code the idea. DEVELOPERS WANTED!!

ANCILLARY IDEA: decentralized open-access peer-reviewer scientific journals

A branching idea that will be part of this project relates to easier access to research by developing decentralized open-access peer-reviewed scientific journals. The articles in these journals will be dynamic in nature and contributors will have the ability to add discussions and modifications as new insights are gained over time. Non-technical summaries suitable for a general public readership will be also required in addition to the main technical paper. This is in contrast to current peer-reviewed scientific articles that have three main problems: 1 they are hard for the wider community to get access to (expensive subscriptions), 2. they are hard for the general public, or even scientists for other disciplines, to understand due to the jargon of specific communities, 3. they are static in nature after their official publication.

Other ideas:

Easier access to published research is needed. In the US, taxpayer-funded research (national labs and government-funded research in general, which is most of it) is open in principle but one has to play tricks to find the information. It is usually posted in not-easy-to-find repositories. Having an AI platform to search through these repositories and organizes the information in an easily searchable way would be another great spin-off of this project. Here's an example of one such source of publications from the US: https://www.osti.gov/search-tools . This is not just for publications, but also for patents, code, etc, funded by the US government.

So, easier access to information is one of the problems. The second one is the jargon used, many people would not understand what the authors want to say because it is written in a jargon that a very small community can understand, and not necessarily the people that have the problem to be solved. It all goes back to communication and building the bridges so that what is written in those articles could be translated to the people for which that research is useful.

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These ancillary ideas will contribute to facilitating that the Dscience to Dtech platform runs more smoothly by enhancing the access to scientific research, and improving the communication between all the relevant parties involved in the evaluation of the potential of research findings to lead to new technologies.

We want to emphasize that, while initial funding is required to (a) develop the platform and (b) to fund the "first science to tech translations", the long-term goal is that the system is self-sustained by keeping a percentage of the profits from the new technologies available to fund new potential translations of scientific research to new technologies.