Nope nope nope
The proposed scheme is not progress-free, so it has natural incentives toward centralization. This is basically the most basic requirement of distributed proof-of-work schemes, which shows the researchers do not understand the way that Bitcoin is supposed to work. Their overt sensationalizing also suggests this — (a) Bitcoin's hashpower has LONG been majority-controlled by 2-3 mining pools, and (b) GHash.IO has long had a significant proportion of hashpower. Both are serious problems for a supposedly decentralized currency, but the notion that Bitcoin is "suddenly centralized" in an "Armageddon" event a few days ago is simply nonsense. There was no flag day.
Furthermore, this whole idea of eliminating large pools by making pooling impossible is flawed. Pools are necessary to reduce income variance to a point where ordinary miners can participate. Without them, mining will pretty-much have to collapse into oligarchy (perhaps funded by hosting mining power, a far worse centralization risk than pooling).
A useful research direction would be to force miners to actually verify the work that their pool is giving them (or even control this work directly, as is done for example by P2Pool) to at least ensure that they -can- detect malicious behaviour. Or if the researchers are really just PR goons, perhaps they could push education out to miners that (a) larger pools do not mean larger payouts, so diversify for chrissakes, (b) using decentralized pools like P2Pool are good for Bitcoin's security, so miners who care about Bitcoin (hopefully most of them) should go in that direction.
Crap like this where self-promoting researchers say smart-sounding nonsense is very damaging to the Bitcoin ecosystem because it discourages real researchers from wanting to be involved in the system. The PR fallout is stressful enough to deal with without The Reg promoting it.
