Yongli Mou, Jiahui Geng, Xiaoli Yang, Shijie Nie, Chunmiao Li, Yongzhao Li and Lucas Regh (AISpace team) won the best technical implementation award and won the industry challenge at the Blockchain Hackathon 2021 (https://www.blockchain-hackathon.de/). AISpace team presented the idea to combine blockchain, privacy-preserving computation and semantic web technologies to overcome the data privacy challenges in AI, to build an AI digital asset marketplace, to connect data owners, data users, algorithm developers, algorithm users and computing providers, to encourage the corporation between AI service participants, and to establish the decentralized, autonomous and trustworthy AI infrastructure network.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been ubiquitous in daily life and applied in many industry verticals such as medical, healthcare, IoT, finance, etc. AI has the tremendous economic impact of AI on the world economy. According to a report from PwC, AI will bring an additional 14% boost to global GDP by 2030, equivalent to a growth of $15.7 trillion. Three factors make AI such successful: the increasing amount of data being generated, the significant increase in computing power, and the breakthroughs of algorithms (e.g. deep learning).
Internet giants, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, have been exposed to data leaks and abuse, and have been fined by the EU in recent years for data privacy, monopoly, and other issues. With the world-wide emergence of data protection legislation, for example The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union, the HIPAA Act in the USA, and the China Data Protection Regulations (CDPR), societies have become increasingly aware of privacy preservation. However, AI models require massive amounts of high-quality data for training and optimization, and data privacy and regulation prevent effective data sharing.
The technological innovations bring new opportunities to improve data utilization, while complying with data protection regulations. Combining the blockchain (smart contract, NFT, IPFS), privacy-preserving computation and semantic web technologies, together with AI can improve the data utilization and AI service performances. AISpace aim to establish a decentralized, autonomous, collaborative, trustworthy AI infrastructure network that connects data owners, data users, algorithm developers, algorithm users and computing providers, and build an decentralized AI digital asset marketplace.