8 minute read
CIO INSIGHTS
by CIOONE
BLOCKCHAIN AND AI CONVERGENCE
Tabis Asifi,Group IT Governance Lead of MAF Holding, Dubai, along with his colleague Farrukh Munir, Enterprise Senior Architect, MAF Holding, elaborates on Blockchain and AI Convergence in this expert opinion article
Advertisement
Tabish Asifi Group IT Governance Lead, MAF Holding, Dubai, UAE
Many enterprises have plenty of data but don’t know how to make it available to the world. Dormant value of data stalks everywhere. Conversely, many startups know how to turn data in to value using AI, but they’re starving for data. A few companies Google, Facebook, Baidu, Alibaba and the like, have both massive datasets and the AI knowledge to turn it into significant business value. These companies are not purely AI companies, rather they’ve used the combination of data and AI to become the most powerful companies in the world.
We are in 2020 and our social order runs on data, yet much of it is controlled by a handful of companies with more power, resources, and reaches than most nations. How can we equalize access to data with strong privacy, and therefore opportunity to make the most of upcoming technology enablers like AI.
This is where blockchain can provide complimentary value. Blockchain is a data structure that distributes trust across many nodes instead of one. One popular example of blockchain is Bitcoin. If “A” wants to send Bitcoin to “B”, then all the miners (nodes) in the bitcoin network are requested to validate that transaction. If the majority of the miners validate that transaction to be viable then the transaction is executed and added in the blockchain , which is essentially a shared ledger. These blocks in the shared
ledger are immutable. You would need to have more computing power of around 500 super computers in the world combined to create a fake transaction. This assurance of immutabikity of trsnaction is what provides bitcoin its USP. That’s one of the reason why Bitcoin has $165 Billion market cap at the moment. This also shows the potential of blockchain as a technology to unlock business value in the existing market.
We already know that blockchain is great for facilitating digital transactions, but it can also be used for formalising digital relationships through smart contracts. Smart contracts are to compare the technology to a vending machine. Ordinarily, you would go to a lawyer or a notary, pay them, and wait while you get the document. With smart contracts, you simply drop a money into the vending machine (i.e. blockchain ledger), and your escrow, driver’s license, or whatever drops into your account. More so, smart contracts not only define the rules and penalties around an agreement in the same way that a traditional contract does, but also automatically enforce those obligations.
Integration of Blockchain and AI
• Educated guess work is done by AI where Blockchains are more about validation, permanence and greater degree of certainty and control
• Cataclysmic risks of AI can be limited by smart contracts. Smart Contract can limit catastrophic actions of AI in real-time and record all actions whichever is taken by AI Algorithm which go unchecked. • Blockchain creates a clear audit trail and provenance that we can use to trace the data and understand how data was used to make decisions by AI algorithm. Blockchain and its ledger record all data and variables that go through a decision made under machine learning. Blockchain provides high degree of canonical reference of data for who did what, when, why and for how long.
• Blockchain organizes data on a decentralized ledger at scale and allows participants in the network to determine how their data should be monetized, so, monopolization of data is mitigated.
Here are the examples of real use cases that point out what blockchain and AI can do together.
Decentralised Data Marketplace
OpenMined , an open-source community has created a decentralised marketplace for data. In terms of AI and Blockchain, this is a great example. OpenMined has de
veloped a platform to facilitate the decentralised ownership of data and intelligence by providing a peer to peer network which allows any new company or person to train their AI models on someone else data. Blockchain based peer to peer network ensures the transaction between two strange parties, where one party say a start-up or Data Scientist can train their AI model and the other party gets paid while using her data without sacrificing the privacy.
Let’s say, if I own an Algorithm and want to train my algorithm, and I need your data to train my algorithm. If there is a third party involve like a central server, then three different people are involved in this transaction and they can steal from each other. If I give you my model, there could be a high degree of probably that my algorithm can be compromised or if you give your data to me in order to train my model your data can be stolen and its privacy can be compromised. Third party, who is ensuring a trust and make a transaction in between us, can also steal my algorithm and your data. So, we end up having a less than optimal scenario.
Your data, my model and I pay you for your data in order to train my model and after getting it trained, I get back my model without giving up the IP (Intellectual Property) of my model. How this transaction can happen without trusting each other? This is the problem OpenMined attempts to solve.
OpenMined is trying to solve two fundamental issues while using AI and Blockchain together.
• OpenMined decentralised Blockchain platform facilitates to allow large groups of individuals to train the algorithms without needing to ever reveal the contents of their data.
• OpenMined seeks to allow individuals to continue to retain ownership and privacy of the AI algorithms that are trained on someone else’s data. The fundamental difference between OpenMined and other projects, is their ability to capitalise on the idea that intelli
gence and data between two non-trusting parties can be brought together without compromising the privacy and intellectual property of either.
Self Driving Car network
Another excellent example is self driving car network. Pretty soon, we are going to see lots of self driving car on the roads , essentially giant , autonomous and fast moving machines. We have to be very careful how we architect this self driving car network. One way to do it is to design the centralised server which will control every other car on the road. Just think about the security implication of this approach. If someone hack this server then every single car is vulnerable to attack. We need a better system. These autonomous cars would be communicating to each other and sharing massive information in real time e.g. during changing the lanes, sharing congestion information to each other etc. If instead of a centralized system, we could let these machines cross talk to each other directly in real time, in a secure and trusted way without the need of a centralized trusted third party. This builds up a case for the use of blockchain network as a possibility.
Whenever we use a Blockchain, it encourages a data sharing which leads to more data which leads to better AI model. Ideally we would want to have an audit trail as well in case there is a car crash happened. Anyone can verify that what the AI model is thinking at that point in time once accident happened. As we have mentioned above, Blockchain records all the actions and decision whatever are being taken by AI algorithm and we can limit some action if we have to through smart contract as well. Hence here , the rules on the blockchain also helps to control the end result and behaviour of the AI’s model.
Benefits of Blockchain and AI
AI is probabilistic we don’t know what
outcome is going to be as AI algorithm is constantly updating and changing its learning based on training data being fed and the algorithm guess what reality is going to be. But Blockchain on the other hand is deterministic; we know what the outcome is going to be. It is permanent and immutable. Blockchain’s data does not change at all. Algorithm and cryptography record in real time. AI and Blockchain are different technologies but are very complimentary to each other. There is a lot of synergy in between these two technologies.
No doubt, each technology has its own individual degree of complexity, but both AI and Blockchain are in situations where they can benefit from each other and help one another.
Conclusion
it has received attention of researchers but projects and use cases related to this innovative combination are still scarce.
These two technologies have potential to use data in way which may not have been possible before, because, convergence ensures that data, and Intellectual property would not be compromised. Data is the key element for continuous improvement of AI algorithm, and blockchain facilitates to secure this data, maintain end to end audit trail of all the steps which are taken by AI.
We know that AI can be incredibly revolutionary, but AI based system should be designed with due diligence and blockchain can provide great the assurance factor in order to achieve that goal. In my opinion, this convergence would likely help build innovative value propositions through use of AI and machine learning on shared data over blockchain.
