This Brief publication is a unique and multidisciplinary study of the problem of consensus from moral, epistemological, religious, and sociological standpoint, in addition to the computational perspective grounded in computer science (focused on data management and distributed computing). It broadly explores two fronts: the first part focuses on ethics and humanities, while the second part focuses on computational and algorithmic aspects explained intuitively. This book is a genuine call for reflection aimed at a two-fold audience of technologists and philosophers including students, researchers, and practitioners interested in such technological-emerging ethical and social issues.

Surveys consensus from an ethical, epistemological, religious, and sociological perspective Contains an abstract universal model of consensus that covers computational agreement concisely and intuitively Examines the social implications of consensus

Autorentext

Mohammad Sadoghi is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Davis. Formerly, he was an Assistant Professor at Purdue University. Prior to joining academia, he was a Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center for nearly four years. He received his Ph.D. from the Computer Science Department at the University of Toronto in 2013. At UC Davis, Prof. Sadoghi leads the ExpoLab research group with the aim to pioneer a new exploratory data platform (referred to as ExpoDB) a distributed ledger that unifies secure transactional and real-time analytical processing, all centered around a democratic and decentralized computational model.Spyros Blanas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University since 2014. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a member of the Database Systems group and the Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab. Part of his Ph.D. dissertation was commercialized in Microsoft SQL Server 2014 as the Hekaton in-memory transaction processing engine. His research interest is high-performance database systems and his current goal is to build a data management system for high-end computing facilities.

Inhalt

Chapter 1. On the Concepts of Democracy.- Chapter 2. Philosophical Perspectives.- Chapter 3. Computational Perspectives.- Chapter 4. Fault-Tolerant Consensus Protocols.- Chapter 5. Sociotechnology Reform: Call for Reflection.- Chapter 6. Final Remarks: A Path Forward.