Berkeley

Our mission

Advance the science and technology of decentralization and decentralized intelligence, to make it universally accessible and empower a responsible digital economy.

Decentralized trust has many advantages, including providing stronger security guarantees, enabling open access and participation, and providing transparency. Decentralized systems enable decentralized trust and empower new economies such as Decentralized Finance, the Creator Economy, and Data Sovereignty. In the future, programmable, decentralized systems can enable autonomous agents and organizations to operate effectively with decentralized trust, empowering decentralized intelligence.

The Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence (RDI) is a new multi-disciplinary campus-wide initiative, focusing on advancing the science, technology and education of decentralization and empowering a responsible digital economy. The RDI Center currently includes faculty and students from computer science, finance/economics, and law, and will support 3 pillars: research, education, and community / entrepreneurship.

Research areas include foundations for next generation decentralization technologies including scalability, usability, provable security guarantees, auditable privacy, incentive compatibility, systemic stability, and decentralized systems and intelligence, decentralized governance, and responsible innovation / regulation guidance, etc.

Besides advancing the science, technology and education in this space, responsible innovation is a key aspect of the Center’s mission and goals, where the Center will explore new approaches for analyzing and understanding the societal impact of decentralized systems, and help ensure that decentralization technologies will be used in a responsible way to help protect the welfare of individuals and society, protect privacy, level the playing field and empower innovation, promote fairness, inclusiveness, ethics, and explore legal frameworks to support innovation and regulation compliance.

RDI will continue to build upon UC Berkeley’s strong foundation and leadership in these areas, as recently recognized and noted below:

RDI stands as a hub for global innovation and collaboration. We have launched several pioneering educational initiatives that have garnered worldwide participation. At the forefront is our world-first LLM Agents MOOC, which has drawn tens of thousands of registered learners. Additionally, we have also launched the world's first Zero Knowledge Proofs MOOC and Decentralized Finance MOOC, with each attracting thousands of students globally. These educational initiatives are designed to democratize access to cutting-edge knowledge across diverse domains. In addition, in alignment with our commitment to open-source principles, work funded by RDI is generally released into the public domain through publications and open-source code.

For more details about the RDI Center and to stay updated on our latest developments, please join our mailing list. Students interested in exploring research opportunities and internship programs offered by the RDI Center are encouraged to fill out this form. If you have questions about our academic offerings, please visit RDI Academics for more details.

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Affiliated Institutions and Organizations