David Dao
David Dao is the Chief Scientist of GainForest.Earth, a decentralized science non-profit dedicated to tackling the climate and biodiversity crisis with emergent technologies, and Co-Founder of Eval.Science, an autonomous research collective working on novel mechanisms for science funding. Previously, David won the XPRIZE Rainforest Impact Prize by co-leading an interdisciplinary team of 60 researchers into the Amazon rainforest, mapping 100 ha using AI in co-design with Indigenous communities. He is also the co-inventor of data valuation with Shapley values. David earned his doctorate degree in computer science from ETH Zurich, and was a postdoctoral scholar in environmental science.
Session
Current mechanisms for funding public goods in the Web3 ecosystem face a fundamental scaling challenge: as the number of projects grows, the cognitive overhead for funders becomes increasingly burdensome. This talk introduces Deep Funding (deepfunding.org), a mechanism recently invented by Vitalik Buterin that leverages AI, market dynamics, and expert human judgment to efficiently allocate resources across complex dependency networks.