DevCon 8 Community Hub: The Open Science Agents Hub

Community Hubs
1

Summary of Proposal

The Open Science Agents Hub is a four-day, hands-on program where builders create transparent AI tools for scientific discovery. Participants will build an evidence-grounded research agent and a drug-repurposing agent using open data, inspect sources and decisions, test failure modes, and publish reusable open-source workflows for accessible, reproducible, verifiable science.

Motivation and Rationale

  • How would this Community Hub enhance the attendee experience?

Over four days, someone with no prior agent experience can walk out with two working open-source agents on their own laptop: an evidence-grounded research agent and an auditable drug-repurposing agent. They also leave with the run manifests, evidence tables, and red-team notes that make those agents trustworthy. It turns a spectator experience into a builder one, and gives people a concrete tool they can keep contributing to after Devcon.

  • How would it complement Devcon 8 India? In what ways does it add a unique piece to the overall experience?

Devcon 8 in Mumbai is Ethereum’s flagship gathering for a free, open, and verifiable future, and DeSci is one of the clearest places those values meet the real world. This Hub brings a working, hands-on DeSci track to the floor. Not a pitch about decentralized science, but the actual tooling: agents that link every claim to an inspectable source, produce reproducible run manifests, and treat verifiability as a build requirement. It bridges the Ethereum builder crowd and the scientific and bioinformatics community, and gives India’s large developer and life-sciences talent pool a direct on-ramp into open science.

  • Why is this topic significant, and why is a Community Hub the best format to address it instead of a one-time talk or workshop?

Scientific AI is moving fast, and most of it still sits behind closed models, unlinked claims, and results no one can reproduce. That is exactly the failure mode Ethereum’s culture of open source and verifiability resists. A four-day Hub gives us room to build in the open, red-team our own work, onboard newcomers, and hand off maintainable repositories and workshop material that outlive the event.

  • Devcon is the global Ethereum gathering for builders of a free, open, private, and verifiable future. How would this Devcon Community Hub support builders and their journey?

    • Free to attend

    • Code will be published in a public repository

    • Original workshop material will remain publicly reusable

    • Every agent output will link its claims to inspectable sources. Participants will generate evidence tables and run manifests recording the sources, queries, timestamps, model and code versions, configuration, and relevant artifacts used during a run.

    • The workshops will also cover data minimization, secret handling, prompt injection, poisoned or retracted sources, fabricated citations, dependency risks, unsafe tool permissions, and the importance of keeping sensitive patient or unpublished research data out of third-party systems.

  • Have you organized a Community Hub at a past Devcon edition? What have you learned? What would you carry forward or change?

This is our first Devcon Community Hub. Our team has run a multi-track hackathon, both virtual and onsite, supported by partners including Solana and Prime Intellect, so we come in with practical experience running hands-on builder programming, managing mentors and help desks, and keeping newcomers from getting stranded.

Programming - Sample Schedule (9am to 6pm)

  • Please provide a list of possible speakers and topics.

    • Geeve - Drug-Repurposing and Scientific Program Lead: Biomedical framing, disease-target evidence, molecular-data interpretation, candidate ranking, scientific limitations, and evaluation.

    • Chaitanya - Building a State-of-the-art bioinformatics CLI

    • Johannes - Open Science and Community Lead: Open-science practices, community facilitation, scientific-review coordination, and post-event continuity.

    • Ritvik - Research Agent Technical Lead: Research-agent architecture, literature-source integrations, evidence extraction, reviewer agents, hypothesis generation, and reproducible run manifests.

    • Marten - Head of Engineering

Time Days 1 & 3: Evidence-Grounded Research Agent Days 2 & 4: Auditable Drug-Repurposing Agent
09:00–10:00 Welcome, onboarding, and trustworthy scientific AI Welcome, biomedical framing, and safety boundaries
10:00–11:00 Research-agent architecture and open literature sources Drug-repurposing architecture and open biomedical data
11:00–13:00 Guided build: literature retrieval and evidence extraction Guided build: disease to targets to compounds
13:00–14:00 Networking, help desk, and newcomer onboarding Networking, help desk, and newcomer onboarding
14:00–15:30 Hypothesis generation and reviewer agents Molecular properties and evidence-aware ranking
15:30–16:30 Scientific-agent red-team clinic Scientific review and failure analysis
16:30–17:30 Open build clinic and advanced extensions Drug-repurposing build clinic
17:30–18:00 Demonstrations, limitations, and closing Candidate reports, limitations, and closing

  • How does your proposed topic support Devcon’s focus on Ethereum’s core properties, open-source ethos and community bridge-building?

    • Open source: Public code, workshop materials, documentation, issues, and contribution pathways.

    • Censorship resistance: Exportable artifacts, open formats, and no mandatory platform dependency.

    • Verifiability: Stable source identifiers, evidence tables, run manifests, artifact hashes, and independent reproduction.

Audience

  • Who is your hub for, and what kinds of attendees do you hope to reach?

    • Ethereum and DeSci builders seeking practical open-science problems.

    • AI and software engineers interested in trustworthy scientific agents.

    • Scientists, research software engineers, and data curators.

    • Biomedical-data and cheminformatics practitioners

    • Students and early-career builders

Team

  • Who are the list of dedicated people that will organize and be fully responsible for the Community Hub?

    • Mentioned above

  • Why are they best-suited to lead this initiative? What expertise, knowledge or perspective do they offer in the proposed topic?

The team covers scientific depth, agent engineering, and open-science practice. Geeve leads the biomedical and drug-repurposing science. Ritvik leads research-agent architecture, evidence extraction, reviewer agents, and reproducible run manifests. Chaitanya brings bioinformatics tooling and CLI experience that keeps the builds practical. Johannes leads open-science practice, community facilitation, and post-event continuity. Marten, as Head of Engineering, anchors technical quality.

  • How will you ensure that the Community Hub remains a neutral, welcoming space, free from marketing or promotion of specific tokens, projects, or commercial interests? How will you guarantee that any personal or team affiliations do not compromise this neutrality?

Everything we build uses open data (Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, open biomedical and cheminformatics datasets) and ships as public, openly licensed code with no dependency on any platform, token, or paid product. Sessions teach transparent, reproducible methods, not any Bio Protocol product, token, or roadmap.

  • Does the organizing team and its contributors able to provide content in different languages? Devcon is a global gathering and India itself has an incredible number of local languages.

    • Kannada, Hindi