Over the last 3 years the concepts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Development and blockchain technologies has been hot on the lips of people all over the world from silicon valley executives to governments trying to integrate their benefits into their own systems and services. The growth in both these sectors has been astounding and disruptive. AI applications itself are numerous and often times we use AI technologies in our day to day lives without even realizing it from storing and sending images and data on our phones everyday to using complex AI based algorithms at our workplaces. While developments in self driving cars and cloud computing mean that AI is going to play a huge role in the future economy. The increase in AI applications can be explained by the advances in Machine Learning (ML), Computer Vision (CV), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) research, as well as the ready availability of cloud computing.
However according to their whitepaper AI development and integration is currently still in the very early stages of development and inaccessible for most individuals due to inefficiencies in data processing, diverging tasks and high computational costs. The Effect Network tries to solve these problems by leveraging block chain technology and its decentralized nature to directly connect supply and demand for AI applications without the need for an intermediary party and use this to boost discoverability on the network, resulting in a high degree of collaboration and data sharing between agents.
It also increases knowledge diversity and makes AI more affordable by sharing costs and provides direct benefits by efficiency gains in ; Accessibility, accuracy, performance, interoperability of AI systems. The Effect Mechanical Turk platform is a decentralized, peer to peer marketplace for tasks that require human intelligence. It provides similar features as centralized services like Amazon Mechanical Turk, It is a crowd sourcing technology that enables requesters to submit tasks that can be completed by human agents in exchange for compensation. Users can work on tasks from requesters at any time, anywhere and from any device.
The tasks themselves are called Human Intelligence Tasks (HIT). The providers of the HITs are called requesters. When a worker completes a task they are paid with the token EFX. Requesters can put tasks on the Effect Mechanical Turk platform to be completed by workers. They can decide how many EFX the workers will get for each completed task and the workers can complete the tasks from the requesters in exchange for the EFX tied to these tasks. Afterwards requesters can retrieve the results from the platform and use these results to train their AI algorithm. Effect Mechanical Turk gives requesters access to an on-demand, scalable and distributed workforce. A task thus represents a piece of work that has been submitted by a requester, and can be accepted by workers that match its requirements. Each task points to a data set that can contain any amount of media assets. The contract ID of the task will validate the format of the data.
The structure and required feedback for a task is defined by the contract ID and the blueprint. Each type of task requires a smart contract to handle interaction. Effect maintains a database of deployed smart contracts to make it easy for requesters and workers to interact with the network.
The Effect Network decentralized AI Marketplace:
The next phase of the Effect Network as per the whitepaper is the creation of decentralized marketplace where AI algorithms can exchange their services. An application owner would be able to register on the exchange by specifying a public endpoint of his application, following their data interchange format and specifying a usage fee for consumers. This application would be initiated and completed entirely on smart contracts on the blockchain. The Buyer wanting to acquire any particular AI service or application on the network would than have to buy the contract by transferring the required funds to the owner of the smart contract to get an authorization token that allows him or her to interact with the AI based application integrated with the contract.
Application endpoints on the Effect AI Exchange would then communicate over the HTTP protocol with data being exchanged in JSON format and the defined RDF schema. RDF Schema would allow for a mechanisim for data-modelling vocabulary for RDF data. RDF Schema is an extension of the basic RDF vocabulary.
The Governance system
The final phase of the network would also allow for the actual computation to be distributed, so tht the AI algorithims can run globally without any failure. Thier white paper claims that this would be achievable qwing to the fact that most machine learning algorithms have rigid structure, and operate on sets of weights. The Effect decentralized compute engine is based on deep-learning networks like Caffe and Tensorflow, where the network structure can be defined as a declarative graph and weights are stored as matrices of real numbers.
Finally the Team aims to maintain a central pool of tokens to provide liquidity on the network and encourage adoption as well as stabilize overall network fees and climate market inefficiencies. This pool will be called the Galaxy Pool which is a governed exchange system and pool and would consist of a mix of EFX tokens as well as the native tokens of the NEO block chain(Neo and gas as well as other NEP-5 tokens) on whose protocol effect Network would operate. This setup would assure a stable and fair exchange rate that would be largely safe from possible market manipulation by malicious actors. The pool itself will be based on certain rules, these rules could however be refined and modified by means of a decentralized governance system to ensure stability.
In this decentralized governance system there can not be a single person or organization authoring these changes. To fix this the network would allow prominent people in the community to propose and vote for improvements. Right to vote is at first acquired by selected individuals.
The Galaxy Pool ensures stable exchange rates for users of the platform at all times. Any coin that is bought from the Galaxy will initially be tainted, and a tainted coin can not be sold back to the pool. By tainting the coins they protect the Galaxy Pool from external manipulation and keeps exchange rates stable for workers. A tainted coin is converted to a regular AIX token by spending it through an Effect service contract. These are the service contracts from the tasks and service registry.
On the Effect Mechanical Turk, workers are rewarded tokens for their effort. This however could allow malicious users to gain wealth by submitting a large quantity of tasks with poor quality. To avoid this, the network will appraise users by their quality of work. Users that put in good effort will be rewarded with Honor Tokens (HNR). These tokens can not be traded or sold, but will gradually expire over time. Workers with a large number of honor tokens will be able to apply for more high rewarding tasks and will have to pay less tax to the Galaxy Pool. HNR tokens would also be credited to users when they are rated for good work.
The Team and Roadmap
CEO: Chris R. Dawe, Business management and marketing Project manager of Itsavirus.
Lead Developer: Laurens Verspeek, Bachelor and Master of Science in computer Science. Lead developer Itsavirus.
Lead Blockchain: Jesse Eisses, Bachelor and Master degree Artificial Intelligence. Lead developer Itsavirus.
3 of the 8 team members have also worked at Itsavirus, a software and interaction design company which worked for Heineken and Shell.
The token crowdsale is planned for the end of march, In their Roadmap the Effect M-Turk will be fully released by Q3 2018, the CEO mentioned that the M-Turk will be out way before Q3. By Q2 2019 the Effect Smart Market will be fully released. That’s the decentralized AI platform we discussed earlier, where people can offer and buy AI services. Eventually in Q4 2019 the Effect Power will be fully released, where the platform will run deep learning frameworks.
It is however important to note that the road map is a work in progress only and an estimate and is therefore subject to change.
The Token Sale
ICO Price: 0.07 USD
ICO crowdsale: March 2018
Max supply: 650,000,000 EFX
Important to note that as of the date of this publication the token sale has been successfully completed and has raised a record 11million euros representing 74% of the initial crowd sale target. While all unsold tokens will be burned to ensure fair value to all participants of the crowd sale.
Other Useful Links
T.me/effectai
Facebook.com/effectai
Twitter.com/effectaix
Github.com/effectai
Sources:
(1): https://www.effect.ai/download/effect_whitepaper.pdf
(2): https://www.effect.ai/ico
(3): https://www.itsavirus.com/work