Protopolis Lab

/pro-TOP-uh-lis/ — "Perpetual beta for collective life."

Protopolis Lab at NYU Shanghai studies, diagnoses, and builds protocols for collective life in a world of humans, institutions, and autonomous systems. We work toward forms of coordination that remain open, emergent, and legible, to enable shared worlds to flourish in tomorrow's polis, networks, and habitats.

"Protopolis" fuses "proto" and "polis," evoking the iterative prototyping of civic protocols within the city-as-commons — a public realm of governance, reciprocity, and collective imagination. Guided by classical notions of the polis alongside contemporary philosophies of distributed agency, the Lab treats the polis as a living prototype whose rules are adapted and written in an open-ended way.

Research Areas

1. Civic Protocols & Collective Governance

How coordination mechanisms scale, evolve, and culturally localize across networked commons and communities.

• Dao of the DAO: Eastern Philosophies in Decentralized Worlds — Rong, H., Sun, Z.
• Governing the Commons in Web 3.0? — Rong, H.
• Open Problems in DAOs — Tan, JZ., Merk, T., Hubbard, S., Oak, ER., Rong, H. et al.
• Benchmarking LLMs Against Qualitative Coding in Decoding Public Sentiment on Urban Upzoning — Rong, H., Davis, J., Rada Orellana, M.

2. Embodied Urban Futures

Reclaiming the body as urban evidence — studying how spatial design and emerging tech shape community, play, and well-being.

• The Impact of the Built Environment on Human Mobility Patterns During Covid-19 — Rong, H., Freeman, L.
• Site-Scale Digital Twinning — Yang, J., Rong, H.
• Value of Design: Creating Agency Through Data-Driven Insights — Chegut, A., Kang, M., Rong, H., Yang, J.

3. AI Governance & Agentic Systems

Investigating coordination, trust, and accountability when AI systems act with increasing autonomy across decentralized infrastructures.

• Is Decentralized Artificial Intelligence Governable? — Hu, BA., Rong, H., Tay, J.
• Sovereign Agents: Towards Infrastructural Sovereignty in Decentralized AI — Hu, BA., Rong, H.
• Inter-Agent Trust Models — Hu, BA., Rong, H.

4. Trust Experience Design

Designing trust as a concrete protocol problem — from cryptographic evidence to the social rituals that make delegation legible.

• Turning to Trust Experience Design (TXD): A Manifesto — Rong, H., Hu, B.
• Protocol Futuring — Hu, BA., Chua, S., Rong, H. (ACM CHI 2026)
• Technology, Trust, and Governance — Gordon, E., Rong, H.

Initiative: Beyond Techno-Materialism

Drawing on Eastern philosophical traditions — Buddhist concepts of impermanent embodiment, non-self, and interdependent arising — to interrogate the ontological assumptions embedded in contemporary AI alignment and safety discourse.

Team

• Helena Rong — Lab Director, NYU Shanghai
• Botao Amber Hu — Research Collaborator, University of Oxford
• Juncheng Yang — Research Collaborator, Harvard University
• Felix Beer — Research Collaborator, Harvard University
• Sun Zhe — Research Collaborator, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics
• Jenna Davis — Research Collaborator, Hunter College
• Helen Xu — Research Assistant, University of Pennsylvania

Resources

• Governance Case Studies — A growing library of decentralized governance experiments
• Trust Experience Design Toolkit — Frameworks, workshops, and protocol prototypes
• LLM Research Methods — Workflows for LLM-assisted qualitative analysis
• Open Datasets — Public datasets from research on urban mobility, DAO governance

Contact

Protopolis Lab, NYU Shanghai. Visit protopol.is