Dear Singularitarians,
The world has changed significantly since our last newsletter, COVID-19 has disrupted the lives of millions worldwide and seriously impacted the global economy.
While we’ve been busy at work fulfilling our roadmap releasing critical elements of the SingularityNET ecosystem, we’ve also refocused some of our time on how we can use AI to help both dealing with the current pandemic and moreover prevent the chances of another one occurring in such a way.
We’re living through historic times and now more than ever decentralized technology can light the way forward toward a better world for all.
Platform Announcements:
The SingularityNET Publisher Portal — Open Beta
A critical step in globally democratizing access to AI and further opening the way toward platform adoption.
SingularityNET is excited to announce the launch of its much-awaited Publisher Portal, which will enable AI developers to more easily onboard their services to the SingularityNET Marketplace, which is the premier interface to the SingularityNET decentralized AI platform.
This is a major addition to the platform, and a significant step toward the goal of making decentralized networks a major part of the world’s unfolding AI story. The SingularityNET platform already has the capabilities needed to serve as a blockchain-based platform for the global AI network — so the next major challenge is gaining widespread adoption. Ease of use is a critical factor here, and the Publisher Portal is a massive leap forward in the ease of use of the SingularityNET platform from a developer perspective.
Using the Publisher Portal, AI developers will be able to follow a simple and straightforward series of steps to publish and monetize their AI services on the Marketplace. As it gains adoption, the Publisher interface will serve as a nexus for AI teams that opt to work together by combining AI services in one hub.
Liquidity Staking - Open Beta
In the last few months, we’ve discussed the reasoning, motivations and concepts surrounding liquidity staking, as well as detailing the mechanics behind this important component of the platform. Now we are excited to announce that following a period of closed beta testing we successfully launching the Staking DApp into open beta. You can sign-up / sign-in now on the staking DApp with your SingularityNet credentials to begin your participation in the staking process.
A huge thank you to all of you who took part in the Closed Beta Test, you all did wonderfully well and ensured the quality of the service was there for everyone! Rewards will be distributed shortly!
The initial call for staking opened at 9 AM GMT on Tuesday, April the 7th 2020 for a period of 7 days, following this period the staking window of 30 days then begins. At the end of the staking window and 37 days after the initial call for staking the next window will open. That means that on the 7th of May at 9 AM GMT the second call for staking window will open.
By default, users’ original stake and the reward earned from the previous staking period will roll into the second window. Users can opt-out if they wish to receive their reward at the end of the staking period. The reward pool is 100,000 AGI tokens for each stake period.
Highlight:
EU Report on Blockchain and AI
SingularityNET was featured in a report on the ‘Convergence of Blockchain, AI and IOT’ compiled by The European Union Blockchain Observatory & Forum. The purpose of the report is to examine how blockchain technology can be used in conjunction the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) to path the way for building new kinds of platforms, products and services.
CoVIDathon - A DAIA Decentralized AI Alliance Hackathon
CoVIDathon
The extremely unfortunate medical crisis that currently confronts the human species can be expected to have its upsides along with its downsides. One of the few positive things about crisis situations is the potential they have to bring people together.
The value of AI for helping with COVID-19 has multiple dimensions. Machine learning and machine reasoning are highly effective tools in the bioinformatics arsenal, valuable for helping scientists discover new therapies and diagnostics, and personalize medical solutions. AI-powered simulation models can help track COVID-9 spread better.
The importance of using decentralized technologies at the centre of anti-COVID-19 measures will be apparent to anyone who has put any thought at all into the implications of personal data sovereignty or the lack thereof for social control and freedom.
It is for these reasons that the teams at DAIA, Ocean Protocol and SingularityNET decided to divert some energy from usual pursuits to launch ‘CoVIDathon’ and online Hackathon designed to aid in dealing with Covid-19 and related issues. Leveraging decentralised AI for positive social impact and connecting our global community of medical, AI, and blockchain experts to promote positive change.
The hackathon began on the 1st of April and will run for two months ending on the 1st of June 2020, with a mission to develop and launch open-source code using AI and/or blockchain technology that is focused on finding solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as reducing the risk from future infectious outbreaks.
Tech update:
We’ve seen some incredible advancements in our progress toward realizing the SingularityNET platform. Installation of components is the culmination of a great volume of work and many simulation permutations to ensure all elements are working as intended with all other already installed components .
Let’s break down the tech work that has been carried out over the last two months.
- Launched the enhanced dev portal - Content is constantly being updated
- Java SDK launched
- Support for free calls in Python and Java SDK
- Closed Beta test of both liquidity staking and publisher portal infrastructure
- Launched the staking DApp into open beta
- Launched the publisher portal
- Set up a complete automated CI/CD pipeline for dev portal, staking and publisher DApps
- Working on enhanced uses of the SDK.
- Tracking free calls in daemon
- Commands to manage free call settings in the daemon
As we progress forward we will continue to update on our progress and work toward completion of the H1 Roadmap.
Blog:
AGI Token Staking 2 — Staking Window Periods
In this blog post we explain how we planned the implementation of the staking mechanism for AGI tokens.
As explained in part one of this series, we will use staked AGI tokens to fund the Fiat-Crypto gateway liquidity pool, and users who agree to lock up their tokens for a time period to help us with that will be rewarded, initially with bonus tokens from the Foundation and possibly later with additional rewards.
We decided to enable staking before the Fiat-Crypto gateway is ready to benefit from this liquidity pool, as we believe this will be a valuable learning exercise for us and for the community, and it will allow us to fine-tune any parameters and work out any kinks before deploying the staked tokens for their ultimate purpose. So for the time being, tokens will just be locked in the AGI Staking smart contract, but users will receive their rewards nonetheless.
Discourse social analytics and reputation graph analysis with Aigents
Empowering the community with personal social analytics and reputation studies.
The ability to perform personal social analytics and reputation studies within most major online social media platforms are severely limited by API restrictions guided by privacy protection and internal monetisation models where socially-relevant user-generated content is consumed by market analysis and advertisement businesses.
Users who are consuming the features of these platforms “for free” are limited in their ability to use personal analytics tools and platforms like Aigents©, even if this analysis concerns only the closest environment of the users themselves and does not affect the privacy of the others.
That is why we are looking forward to applying the Aigents machinery to more democratic online environments like Reddit, Steemit and now Discourse — where preservation and protection of privacy do not prevent users and communities to make sense of their own interaction data.
Computing Reputation for Discourse users with Aigents
Making Reputation Assessment with SingularityNET “Weighted Liquid Rank” algorithm available for any Discourse forum community.
In our previous two blog posts on this subject, we have discussed how to create and utilise personal social and graph analytics for Discourse communities with Aigents® and how the Aigents implementation of the SingularityNET Reputation API is designed.
In this the third blog post in the series, we’ll explore the practical aspects of using the Aigents® reputation engine to compute reputation ranks for Discourse forums. The results of the integration will be presented at the end of the post, so feel free to scroll down if you want to access the data straight away.
Making Homes Really Smart with OpenCog & SingularityNET: Part 1
What would make homes really smart? We explore how the use of AI technology can be implemented in the ‘Smart Home’.
The idea of smart homes is far from new, and tech geeks have been trying it for decades. Nowadays, many companies produce various smart home devices abundantly present in the mass market. Many smart home integrators exist, who help users designing and installing whole-house projects bringing all these smart devices together.
Podcast:
This month we have two super interesting podcasts covering both vision and tech.
First up, Dr Ben Goertzel featured on the Soft Robotics podcast dedicated to the robotics community and audience who are interested in soft robotics technology.
and then Ben also featured in this extra episode of ‘The Jim Rutt Show’ where Jim talks to Dr. Ben Goertzel about the economic & cultural impacts we could expect after the peak of COVID-19, the end of the tech backlash, income inequality, homeostasis & hysteresis, business travel bets from Jim & Ben, in-person vs virtual events, potential opportunities, cryptocurrency & blockchain, answering the cultural wakeup call, dynamics of centralized responses in decentralized systems, and more.
Featured Article:
We shouldn’t ban AI surveillance tech — we must fight to own it!
Written by Dr Ben Goertzel
The London Metropolitan Police Service initiating the use of Live Face Recognition technology.
In China, face recognition cameras have widely replaced ID checks, and are in public use to catch not only serious criminals but jaywalker.
Several US states have banned police use of facial recognition tech, and some EU states may follow.
David Brin, in his 2005 classic book The Transparent Society, argued that we are inevitably headed in one of two directions: Surveillance or sousveillance. In this article written by Dr. Ben Goertzel postulates how we can use surveillance technology for the betterment of mankind, and who should have control over it.
YouTube Interviews:
AGI TO END AGING? Brent Nally interviews Dr. Ben Goertzel on April 21, 2020
AGI TO END AGING? Brent Nally interviews Dr. Ben Goertzel on April 21, 2020
Ben Goertzel: Addressing Covid-19 Today for Better A.G.I. Tomorrow. (Supersystemics in the Pandemic) on Think Supersystemic.
Ben Goertzel: Addressing Covid-19 Today for Better A.G.I. Tomorrow. (Supersystemics in the Pandemic) on Think Supersystemic.
The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has caused a pandemic that’s rocked the globe, could #AI be used to prevent diseases like Covid19 from spreading in the future? Dr Ben Goertzel discusses remotely for the AI & Blockchain Summit.
Ben Goertzel: Addressing Covid-19 Today for Better A.G.I. Tomorrow. (Supersystemics in the Pandemic) on Think Supersystemic.
Check out this awesome interview with Dr. Ben Goertzel & Toufi Saliba on the ‘Ameer Approved’ podcast hosted by Ameer Rosic on the dangers we face in using centralized AI to deal with COVID19 issues.
Ben Goertzel: Addressing Covid-19 Today for Better A.G.I. Tomorrow. (Supersystemics in the Pandemic) on Think Supersystemic.
Media Coverage:
We’re glad to report that over the last two months, the explosion of SingularityNET media mentions continues to grow, here are some of the highlights!
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Forbes mentioned DAIA and SingularityNET in this article on projects contributing the global effort in dealing with Covid19
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The Covidathon is featured in this article by Coindesk on the SingularityNET partnership.
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Global Crypto News featured SingularityNET’s GitHub activity as being among the most active projects currently.
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CoinMarketExpert published this blog on the release of the Staking DApp
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Cryptoslate reports on the SingularityNET joining the Eterna Borderless Venture Studio.
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The CoVIDathon is featured in this Asia Times article on crypto community unites against Covid-19
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The Covidathon is also featured by HealthcareIT News
Upcoming Events:
Given the global pandemic, events are operating sporadically, with many events moving to be online events, postponed or cancelled. The following list is at this time currently confirmed but may change.
April 30th - Online - Covid19 Simulation Summit
May 2nd-6th - L.A. - Milken Institute Conference
May 8th-9th - Online - Ethereal Summit
May 18th-23rd - Online - Teamz Blockchain Summit
May 29th 30th - Toronto - CryptoChicks
June 8th-10th - Online - CogX 2020
Community Art:
We were utterly floored by this piece of art created by community member GregNightArt who made this fantastic piece based upon our previous Style transfer competitions winners work.
This work looks so perfect one might think it to be computer-generated, but no, it is in fact made of wood and is a real physical object!
Thank you GregNightArt for this amazing work!
Greg’s imagination and creativity was sparked by this image made by our style transfer competition winner Kyle Webster.
We also have another awesome image created by our resident community AI artist Kyle Webster, who came up with this awesome portrait of our very own Dr. Ben Goertzel, those eyes really do pop out at you!! hanks Kyle!!
Join Us:
SingularityNET plans to reinforce and expand its collaborations to shape the coming AI Singularity into a positive one, for all. To read more about our recent news click here.
And if you have an idea for AI tools or services you’d like to see appear on the platform, then why not raise a request here: Request for AI Portal.
That is it for this newsletter! Be sure to join our Telegram Channel and Community Forum, and follow us on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn!
Thank you for your continued support,
The SingularityNET Team