Decrypting DeSci (Decentralized Science) | Washington DC

We are now on Luma! Go ahead and register to our Luma event. DC Code and Coffee is an inclusive, informal co-working session. It's community-led and community-run by devs, for devs. People of all skill levels attend. Whether you’re dev-curious, aspiring, or a professional developer, we’d love to have you! Come chat or learn to code on a Sunday afternoon with coffee and cool-inclusive people. Bring your laptop! We typically meet every month on the weekend. Join our online community! For all things Tech in DC and to get latest updates and tech events from the DMV area, join the DCTech Slack. All DC Code & Coffee announcements are in the #dccodecoffee channel How it works Near the beginning of the event, we do an introduction circle. You say your name, what you can help others with, and what you would like help with. You can also share job opportunities. After the introduction circle, everything is self-organized.

Join Free the People for Liberty Pub Live, an evening of conversation, ideas, and community at PubKey DC, one of Washington’s most talked-about gathering places. This live event will feature our favorite Congressman Thomas Massie, U.S. Representative for Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District, in conversation with Matt Kibbe, president of Free the People. Now that Congressman Massie has been “liberated” from the shackles of congressional servitude by some $30 million in special interest political expenditures—an all time record—this unplugged conversation will surely explore what it means to live, speak, and vote truly independently. Expect an evening that is extra sassy, and unconventionally honest for something situated in the very heart of Mordor. Come grab a drink, connect, and conspire with fellow friends of liberty, and be part of a live conversation about building a freer, more independent future. Space is limited, so RSVP to reserve your spot. Follow Free the People on YouTube or X to watch a livestream of the event.

Let's attend an author book talk on Who Is in Charge?: Why AI Must Remain Under Human Control by Khaled Koubaa A few copies of the book will be available for participants. Book Introduction: Who is in charge when AI systems advise, decide, automate, and act across institutions? As artificial intelligence becomes more capable, faster, and more autonomous, the old promise of “human in the loop” is no longer sufficient. Many systems now operate at a speed and scale where human review can become ceremonial: a person is present, but not actually positioned to see, challenge, stop, or answer for the system’s conduct. Who Is in Charge? argues for a different doctrine: Human in the Oversight. Speaker & Author Bio: Khaled Koubaa is a technology policy leader, entrepreneur, and governance strategist working at the intersection of Internet governance, digital trust, and AI oversight. He is the Founder and CEO of AT Worthy Technology, where he advances the concepts of Digital Worthiness and AI Worthiness as practical frameworks for accountability, trust, and institutional readiness in the digital age. Khaled serves as a member of the World Bank Group Sanctions Board. Over more than two decades, he has held senior leadership and advisory roles across the global Internet and technology ecosystem. He has served as a Tech + Society Fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, Public Policy Manager at Meta, Head of Public Policy and Government Relations for the MENA at Google, and a member of the Board of Directors of ICANN. He has also served on the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society, the Board of Directors of AFRINIC, the World Bank Group Advisory Council for Citizen Engagement, and the Internet Governance Forum’s Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group. Schedule: 10:30am - 10:50am: Welcome & Introductions 10:50am - 11:40am: Book Talk by Khaled Koubaa 11:40am - 12:00pm: Author Q&A 12:00pm - : [Optional] lunch with the author at Ten Ten West End 👥 Who should join AI practitioners, startup fou

Connecting innovators, policy makers, government stakeholders, entrepreneurs and technologists working to advance America through national security technologies. Come to connect, enjoy a beverage, and meet others working in defense innovation. No sponsors, no pitches, no asks, just community.

Science has a verification problem that predates AI, and AI is about to make it worse. Roughly a third of landmark psychology findings replicate. Over 10,000 papers were retracted in 2023, a record. Irreproducible preclinical research costs the US tens of billions annually. Now AI-generated submissions are beginning to flood a peer review system that runs on unpaid, overloaded human labor. AI can be part of the solution to this problem. AI can now do the tedious work that made verification impossible to scale: extracting claims and statistics from papers, running forensic checks (statistical anomalies, image manipulation, deviations from preregistration), reproducing analyses where code and data exist, and updating evidence syntheses continuously as new results arrive. In a recent benchmark, an ensemble of AI reviewers caught 93 of 100 errors deliberately planted in published psychology papers, at a few cents per error caught. The components of a living evidence layer (an open, continuously updated map of scientific claims and how much to trust each one) are already being built by startups, academic labs, and nonprofits. What's missing is integration and evaluation. This talk lays out what such a system looks like, what it changes for funders, agencies, journalists, and the public, and where government action matters most: turning public archives like PubMed into structured data, commissioning open benchmarks for claim extraction and error detection, and keeping the result a public good rather than a publisher-owned asset. Biography: Paul Litvak is the founder and Executive Director of the Robyn Dawes Institute and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. Over 15 years in industry he worked at Meta, Google, and Airbnb as a data scientist and then leading Machine Learning teams, and co-founded Rhythmic Health, a venture-backed biosensing startup. He has a PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon. His current work involves building AI systems that can weigh