Title: A Token-Based Voting System for Rating News Sources

Biography:

Sean Kim has worked under the advisement of Dr. Neel Tiruviluamala at University of Southern California Math department. Sean is passionate about computer science and hopes to conduct more research in the field.

Abstract

Abstract—There is a stigma associated with newspaper companies that they tend to bend the truth and relay inaccurate information. Token-curated registries (TCR) are decentralized recommender systems designed to collect high-quality information. We have developed a prototype of a voting system based on the TCR system which rates news sources from a scale between 1 (lowest) and 10 (highest). Voters wager and are rewarded in the form of “Newscoin”, a cryptocurrency that voters possess. The performance is evaluated based on the deviation from the average rating wherein users who vote closer towards the average tend to gain profit while those who deviate from the average tend to incur loss. The system can be extended to multiple applications including financial portfolios, rating systems for healthcare, restaurants, and other industries.