The Problems of Consensus: An Inquiry into Democratic and Decentralized Principles

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.

Mohammad Sadoghi is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Davis. Formerly, he was an Assistant Professor at Purdue University and a Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He leads the ExpoLab research group with the mission to pioneer a resilient data platform at scale under his flagship project called Apache ResilientDB (Incubating), a distributed blockchain ledger centered around a democratic and decentralized computational model. He has over 100 publications in leading database conferences/journals, and 36 filed U.S. patents. He has co-authored several books: "Transaction Processing on Modern Hardware" and "Fault-tolerant Distributed Transactions on Blockchain," both published by Morgan & Claypool Synthesis Lectures on Data Management (now under Springer) and a book published by Foundations and Trends® in Databases, entitled "Consensus in Data Management: From Distributed Commit to Blockchain."