Samer Hassan (full name Samer Hassan Collado; born 1982 in Madrid, Spain) is a Spanish and Lebanese computer scientist, social scientist, artificial intelligence researcher, and activist.^[119] His research focuses on the collaborative and sharing economy, online communities, the commons, peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, agent-based modelling, social simulation, and decentralized technologies such as blockchain.^[119] He serves as a tenured professor or associate professor at the Complutense University of Madrid and as a Faculty Associate (affiliated professor and researcher) at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.^[1,2]

An alumnus of the Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Surrey, he completed his doctoral dissertation, titled "Towards a Data-driven Approach for Agent-Based Modelling: Simulating Spanish Postmodernisation", in 2010 under the supervision of Juan Pavón and Millán Arroyo Mendéndez. His academic collaborators and influences include Yochai Benkler, Mayo Fuster Morell, and Nigel Gilbert. Hassan was awarded a 1.5 million euro ERC Grant for the P2P Models project to research blockchain-based decentralized autonomous organizations for the collaborative economy, and is also associated with Triple Canopy.^{[3,116,40,29,30]} His official website is https://samer.hassan.name.

Samer Hassan is a Spanish/Lebanese scholar and academic with an interdisciplinary background that combines computer science with social sciences and activism.^[75] He holds a degree in Computer Science (or Computer Engineering) and a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) in Spain.^[68] He also completed three years of study in Political Science at the distance learning university UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia).^[4] Subsequently, he completed a PhD in Social Simulation in the Department of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence at UCM, supervised by computer scientist Juan Pavón and sociologist Millán Arroyo-Menéndez.^[5]

He has researched at various institutions, funded by several grants, scholarships, and awards, notably the Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard and the Spanish postdoctoral grants Juan de la Cierva and José Castillejo.^[7,8,6] He was a visiting researcher at the Centre for Research in Social Simulation in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, working under the supervision of Nigel Gilbert (2007–2008), and served as a lecturer and professor at the American University of Science and Technology in Lebanon (2010–2011).^{[8,10,9,77,2]} He was selected as a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University (2015–2017) and is currently a Faculty Associate at the center, a role held since 2018.^[10,9,79,78] Starting in 2024, he joined the Institute for Digital Cooperative Economy at The New School as affiliate faculty, part of the Platform Cooperativism Consortium.^[7,11]

As an activist, Samer Hassan has been involved in initiatives both offline (La Tabacalera de Lavapiés, Medialab-Prado) and online (Ourproject.org, Barrapunto, Wikipedia).^[11,13,12] He was accredited as a grassroots facilitator by the Altekio Cooperative.^[6,16,76,15] He was a co-founder of the Comunes nonprofit association in 2009 and the Move Commons webtool project in 2010.^[17,16] He has co-organized practitioner-oriented workshops on platform cooperatives and decentralized free/open source tools for communities, and has presented his work at conferences of Mozilla, the Internet Archive, and others, described by Catalan Wikipedia as academic conferences and by English and Spanish Wikipedia as non-academic conferences.^{[18,19,20,80,21]}

As a privacy advocate, he co-created a course on cyberethics that has been taught since 2013 (until 2019 according to Catalan Wikipedia, as of 2021 according to English Wikipedia, and to the present as of 2026 according to Spanish Wikipedia).^[23,22] He was also a co-founder of the Spanish science fiction magazine Sci-Fdi.^{[25,24,10,81]} His gender is non-binary and he uses he/they pronouns.^[2,27,25]

Samer Hassan's interdisciplinary research spans multiple fields, including online communities, online governance, online collaboration and collaborative communities, decentralized technologies, blockchain-based decentralized autonomous organizations, free, libre, and open-source software, commons-based peer production, agent-based social simulation, social movements, and cyberethics.^{[27,29,30,31,32,33,34,36,83,10,117]} While Catalan and English sources state that he has published more than 60 works in these fields, Spanish sources report over 70 publications.^{[42,35,37,38,40,41,87,85,84]} Hassan's doctoral thesis focused on the methodological challenges of building data-driven social simulation models, with the main model simulating the transition from modern to postmodern values in Spain. His methodological research also explored the combination of various artificial intelligence technologies, including software agents with fuzzy logic, data mining, natural language processing, and microsimulation.^[26,5,88] In his postdoctoral work, he focused on experimenting with multiple software systems to facilitate the collaborative economy and commons-based peer production, such as semantic web tagging for commons-based initiatives, value distribution in peer production communities, compliant online coupled agents and virtual assistants for assemblies, decentralized real-time collaborative software, decentralized blockchain-based reputation, and blockchain-enabled commons governance.^{[42,35,37,38,40,41,47,86,89,90,44,36,118]}

Hassan served as the principal investigator for the Complutense University of Madrid partner in the EU-funded P2Pvalue project, which focused on creating decentralized web tools for collaborative communities. In this role, he led the team that created SwellRT, a federated backend-as-a-service designed to facilitate the development of applications featuring real-time collaboration.^{[43,48,32,45,42,47]} SwellRT was adopted by the Apache Software Foundation, with its intellectual property transferred to the foundation in 2017.^{[44,48,91,43]} As part of this research line, Hassan's team developed two SwellRT-based applications: "Teem" for managing social collectives and Jetpad, a federated real-time editor.^{[47,92,54,55,93,50,44]} He presented the innovations related to this software at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center and the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society.^[51,94,110]

Beyond academic publications, his other research lines have led to practical outcomes and technology transfer outside academia. These include "Wikichron", a web tool co-led by Javier Arroyo to visualize MediaWiki community metrics that is currently in production and available to third parties.^{[61,55,56,59,60,96]} Another outcome is "Decentralized Science", a framework and spin-off social enterprise led by Hassan's PhD student Ámbar Tenorio-Fornés to facilitate decentralized infrastructure and open peer review in scientific publishing, which was selected to receive funding by the European Commission and Mozilla.^{[61,55,56,59,98,63,62]} His research on blockchain and crowdfunding models earned him a commission from Triple Canopy.^{[60,65,64,97]} Additionally, his team advanced a mapping of the ecosystem of blockchain for social good, commissioned and led by the Joint Research Centre and published by the European Commission.^[66]

As part of his European Research Council project P2P Models, Hassan and his team—including Silvia Semenzin—investigate whether blockchain technology and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations can contribute to improving the governance of commons-oriented and collaborative economy communities, both online and offline.^{[64,62,82,63]} His work has addressed the governance impacts of blockchain, proposed alternatives to the current sharing economy, explored emerging forms of artificial intelligence and techno-social systems such as NFTs or prediction markets, and highlighted gender issues in the field.^{[71,63,65,69,107,99,102,41,64,66,103,70]} Hassan was invited to present the project's achievements at the Harvard Kennedy School, the MIT Media Lab, Harvard's Data Privacy Lab, Harvard's Center for Research on Computation and Society, and Harvard's SEAS EconCS.^{[70,72,73,30,108,109,107,71]} British Member of Parliament and Leader of the Opposition Ed Miliband highlighted his research and its potential impact on politics and public policy.^[74,111,110] The project has made public its organizational structure and core values, demonstrating a particular commitment to diversity in hiring and in choosing case studies.^{[41,36,112,24,74]}

In 2016, Primavera De Filippi and Samer Hassan published "Blockchain technology as a regulatory technology: From code is law to law is code" in First Monday on November 14, 2016. In 2020, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, along with Samer Hassan, Anna Hakami, Jaya Klara Brekke, Primavera De Filippi, Genoveva Lopéz Morales, Alexandre Pólvora, Christian Orgaz Alonso, and Balázs Bodó, authored "Scanning the European ecosystem of distributed ledger technologies for social and public good: what, why, where, how, and ways to move forward," published by the Publications Office of the European Union. In 2021, Hassan and De Filippi published "Decentralized Autonomous Organization" in Internet Policy Review on April 20, 2021. Also in 2021, Youssef Faqir-Rhazoui, Miller-Janny Ariza-Garzón, Javier Arroyo, and Hassan contributed to the Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, published by the Association for Computing Machinery on May 8, 2021. Additionally in 2021, David Rozas, Antonio Tenorio-Fornés, Silvia Díaz-Molina, and Hassan published "When Ostrom Meets Blockchain: Exploring the Potentials of Blockchain for Commons Governance" in SAGE Open. On November 8, 2022, Arroyo, David Davó, Elena Martínez-Vicente, Faqir-Rhazoui, and Hassan published work in the Companion Publication of the 2022 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing through the Association for Computing Machinery.

External links associated with the subject include their personal webpage, a biography at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, and the P2P Models webpage. Associated categories identify the subject as a living person born in 1982, an artificial intelligence researcher, a Spanish computer scientist, and an alumnus of the University of Surrey. Furthermore, the subject is categorized as Harvard University faculty and personnel, Lebanese university academic staff, a Lebanese scientist, a 21st-century Lebanese LGBTQ individual, and an activist in both Lebanon and Spain.