The web has become an integral part of modern life, providing people with a vast array of resources and opportunities to connect, communicate, and access information. People conduct a wide variety of activities online including but not limited to communication, research, shopping, banking and finance, entertainment, education, social networking, and work. As we integrate aspects of our lives more fully into online experiences, there is an enormous amount of data collected about our behaviors and preferences in these experiences. This data is used to curate more meaningful experiences for us online via platform-specific algorithms that are able to understand and design for us. This data becomes a representation of who we are online — our persona deduced from our online behavior. Personalization has traditionally been centered around the behavior of individuals. Companies are using data to tailor their products and services to individual customers’ specific needs and desires. However, with the increasing importance of social alignment, personalization is shifting to become more community-focused, nuanced, and complex. Rather than just considering the preferences of individual users, personalization mechanisms must now also consider the values and beliefs of communities to which those users belong. This shift is partly driven by the importance of social media and other online platforms that allow people to connect easily with like-minded individuals and form communities based on shared interests. We at FirstBatch believe in the democratic principles of an open web where users are empowered with a self-sovereign, privacy-preserving, interoperable ID that allows them to use their data to access the best possible experiences and interactions. We will share our vision for the new frontier of personalization built with AI, Zero Knowledge Proofs, and Decentralized Social Graphs that will fundamentally change the way in which we understand communities across the web and individual’s relationships to them. https://twitter.com/ethanpchamp Ethan Champagne BD / Partnerships Manager FirstBatch Eternal student and lover of languages, I incorporate my broad background in Education, Economics and the Arts into my current work uniting communities with AI and preserving privacy with ZK proofs at FirstBatch. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aucWd4xo1B4

The talk will be broken into three parts. Part I will present some helpful background information for context. It'll introduce the notion of a consensus mechanism with "real world" examples like the ones mentioned above (e.g., driving a car) and a little bit of history from distributed systems and from blockchain. Part II will present the tradeoffs between PoW and PoS: the history, the strengths and weaknesses of each system, with a bit of Ethereum history, Ethereum's motivation for switching, and a discussion of the Merge and how the Eth Beacon chain works. Part III will present some "outside the box" alternatives to PoW and PoS, such as Solana's "proof of history" and Spacemesh/Chia/Filecoin's approach using proofs of space-time. Again, the tradeoffs around these mechanisms will be discussed and they'll be presented in the context of running, production networks. The conclusion will talk about implications for the application layer and for dapp developers: ways in which the consensus mechanism "leaks" through the abstraction boundaries and impacts UX and DevEx, and ways in which applications themselves can make use of consensus. Lane Rettig ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH5seHS9onI

... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmTDM7rg2xE

... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Failn_CQAc8