Dear Singularitarians,
AI talent is rare. Some estimates indicate that there are 20,000 PhD-level computer scientists around the world capable of building AI systems. Facebook has come under attack for exploiting and draining universities of their valuable researchers.
The FAIR program (could they name it any better?) has received some heavy criticism from leading academics. Dr Oren Etzioni lamented, "Has Facebook’s motto evolved into: ‘Move fast, and break academia’?”
We know where this road leads. We can and must do better.
Last month, when we announced our strategic partnership with UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education aimed at preparing school children for the fourth industrial revolution - we took a significant step in ensuring that the AI talent of the future will be as diverse as possible. While discussing the partnership, Dr. Ben Goertzel commented that “One of our key goals is to make A.I. development more of a broad, participatory pursuit, to ensure that A.I. algorithms and services are created and contributed by a very wide variety of people, with different backgrounds and knowledge and interests.”
Our Global Recruitment Campaign is now Live
A diverse group of AI talent will be powerless if the dominant systems in place are discriminatory, exploitative or restrictive. As an Open Access Network, SingularityNET will be the blank canvas for all the talented AI artists to express themselves. Most importantly, it will empower the AI talent to escape the dictates of the dominant systems of today that operate with the prime directive of increasing the shareholder value of a few centralized corporations.
It was with this goal of encouraging an ethos that values talent that we have recently launched our AI Talent Spotlight series, where we aim to showcase alternative career paths that can lead to a meaningful and rewarding career in AI. We also cover the AI talent landscape that is increasingly dominated by the Tech Oligopoly.
Here is the TL;DR version of the developments in August and September:
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Dr. Ben Goertzel did an AMA with the SingularityNET community, you can read it on our subreddit.
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Arif Khan writes about the AI talent landscape in a first part of a three part series.
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We have 20+ Jobs live on our jobs page. Apply Now!
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In August, 327 Commits were made in the various repositories of SingularityNET and 5 new Repositories were added to our Github.
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We released the second episode of our podcast, where we spoke with Dr. Julia Mossbridge, the founder of the Loving AI project as our guest.
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Our AI Researchers made advances in Unsupervised Language Learning and investigated a hybrid approach to Visual Question Answering to advance the research initiatives of SingularityNET.
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We continue to grow our presence in China. Kent Zaitlik, our China Lead, was a panel speaker at the Slush Shanghai 2018 event.
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We partnered with the IOT based data marketplace: Weeve and with Unesco.
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We announced the artwork competition and hope to announce a winner from the submitted entries soon
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We started a social media campaign to express appreciation for our community volunteers.
We represented SingularityNET at the following events: Singapore DeepTech Summit, Slush Shanghai 2018, Startup Grind Shenzhen, AI/Blockchain Conference, Asia Risk Congress 2018 and Human Level AI 2018.
Leading With Tech
We had 37 public repositories live on Github last month and we now have 42 Repositories on Github.
Some of the new repositories include:
Nlp-service
This repository contains a number of SingularityNET services for understanding or manipulating natural language.
Style-transfer-service
This service uses convolutional neural networks to transfer the style of an image to another.
In total, our team members made 327 commits during August in the SingularityNET Github repositories. As of now, the total commits in the 42 Repositories of SingularityNET equal 110,791 .
Business Strategy
Partnerships
In line with the vision of building an ecosystem of decentralized AI networks we plan to keep increasing the capabilities of SingularityNET through strategic partnerships.
Last month, we partnered with Weeve - an organization building a decentralized platform to transform IoT data into tradable digital assets. The partnership between SingularityNET and Weeve will allow for the development of AI services upon a secure and attested data layer. SingularityNET will provide the AI services required for autonomous economic agents, while Weeve will provide the attestation technology and infrastructure necessary for the development of truly decentralized and secure data marketplaces.
AI Research Lab
Our AI Researchers are actively involved with cutting-edge research that adds to the uniqueness and competitiveness of SingularityNET as a platform. The research articles published in August include:
- Bridging the Language Divide by Dr. Anton Kolonin, which sheds light on how SingularityNET is making advances in Unsupervised Language Learning.
- Enabling Cognitive Visual Question Answering by Dr. Alexey Potapov, which takes an exploratory look at a hybrid approach toward Visual Question Answering.
Press & Events
Dr. Ben Goertzel, Sophia, and other team members represented SingularityNET through various events, publications, and interviews in August. Notable media mentions and interviews include:
- SingularityNET’s Partnership with UNESCO - to ensure that the educational institutions are preparing children for the coming fourth industrial revolution.
- Human Level AI 2018 - members of the SingularityNET team presented at the conference about the present and future revolutionary potential of AI.
- AI Can Help Create A Better World - an article where Dr. Ben Goertzel highlights the role that AI can play in creating a just world.
- Toward Grand Unified AGI - an article by Dr. Ben Goertzel where he discussed Meta-Learning.
- Just Deep Is Too Flat and Experimenting With Generative Capsule Networks - Dr. Alexey Potapov’s research articles, were published in DZONE.
- Robotethics - an interview with Dr. Anton Kolonin was published in the popular Russian tech blog vc.ru.
- Startup Grind Shenzhen - Dr. Ben Goertzel and Kent Zaitlik presented at the conference.
- Asia Risk Congress 2018 - Prof. Tom James, a partner of SingularityNET presented at the conference.
- Slush Shanghai 2018 - Kent Zaitlik was a panel speaker at the event.
Video: Advanced Goals of SingularityNET HLAI 2018
The SingularityNET Podcast
We launched the SingularityNET podcast to serve as an educational platform for our community. A well-informed community will be better equipped for self-governance, which is mandated by our whitepaper. Such empowerment will allow the AGI token holders to shape the evolution of the collective intelligence of the network.
For the Second Episode of the podcast, we invited Dr. Julia Mossbridge to discuss AGI and Unconditional Love.
AI Talent Spotlight
As part of our goal of empowering AI talent we will highlight the profiles of individuals that are at the forefront of the mission to democratize AI. We hope this series inspires the broader community.
For our first interview, we invited AI Researcher Dr. Deborah Duong, affectionately known as Debbie, to find out what it means for her to be part of SingularityNET.
Upcoming Events
Dr Ben Goertzel and the team will be at the following events:
21 September: RAADFest 2018, San Diego
5 November: Web Submmit, Lisbon
9 November: TransTech Conference, Palo Alto
5 December: AI Summit, New York
Community News
Reddit AMA
As we started our journey, one of our commitments to the community was to be fully transparent about our activities. In upholding that commitment, Dr. Ben Goertzel did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit to answer any questions that members of the community may have and to make sure the community felt included in our journey to democratize AI.
We would like to thank the community for participating in the event, asking thoughtful questions and engaging in meaningful debate with Dr. Ben Goertzel. If you would like to read the questions and answers of the AMA, please click here.
One question that is often asked by our community members relates to learning the necessary skills required to become an AI programmer. A recent interview of Dr. Ben Goertzel sheds light on that issue:
What it really takes to become an AGI Programmer - Dr. Ben Goertzel
First Token Holders Call
Another initiative that we have taken to ensure full transparency about our activities, is to start a monthly Token Holder’s Call. We would like to thank everyone that participated and really appreciate their support of the team.
Community Volunteers Appreciation
We have always appreciated the efforts of numerous community members who go above and beyond in supporting us. We recently launched a campaign to publicly acknowledge and to appreciate their help. And we would like to take this opportunity to say thank you once again!
Podcast Guest Suggestion
We began our campaign to crowdsource guest suggestions from the community. Many members of the community responded to our call and made great suggestions that we will take into consideration for future episodes. We invite everyone again to make podcast guest suggestions so that we can invite highly-regarded individuals of interest to the community.
Updates From Africa
We are proud of the developments being done by our team members in Africa. In this newsletter, we would like to highlight iCog’s Anyone Can Code initiative - which can be considered as a precursor to the UNESCO’s program. One of our team members from iCog Labs, Betelhem Dessie served as the project manager, launching this initiative to help school children overcome the deficiencies of an outdated curriculum in the educational institutes of Ethiopia. You can read about the initiative over here.
iCog’s Anyone Can Code initiative - a precursor to the UNESCO’s program.
We Are Hiring!
As our network matures, we will be opening up more ways for you to become directly involved. We have just launched our Official Recruitment Campaign featuring Sophia. Do check out our latest jobs here
Be sure to join our Telegram Channel, participate in our Community Forum, Subreddit, or monitor these email updates to avoid missing out on our updates.
Thank you for your continued support.
The SingularityNET Team