The City of Zion is excited to announce our first software bounty program. Through this program, we aim to encourage the targeted development of open source software that will benefit our community and ecosystem.

The first bounty we are announcing is a $50,000 reward for consensus improvements. Read below for more details.

How does the program work?

One or more developers who create software that best meets the specifications of a bounty will receive a large award, indexed in USD and paid in a combination of NEO and GAS.

Who is eligible to participate?

Absolutely anyone, provided they develop an open source project that meets our specifications and agree to…

Token sales allow developers to raise capital without the friction associated with traditional venture capital investment. As a force for good, these sales open and democratize a fund-raising process typically limited to insiders. However, they also allow scammers or incompetent developers to extract money from a public that lacks the ability to perform due diligence.

Token sales have played a large role in user adoption of the Ethereum blockchain, and we expect they will similarly help to drive the adoption of NEO. Given this reality, it is important to ask: how can we discourage fraudulent or poorly conceived token sales…

Science fiction has long imagined a future in which humans converse with machines. But what are the limits of conversational interfaces? Agents like Siri or Cortana can help us with simple things such as getting directions or scheduling an appointment, but is it possible to apply these agents to more complex goals? Today, our group at Stanford is excited to announce a few ideas we have been exploring through Iris: a conversational agent for data science tasks.

In comparison to the domains targeted by most conversational agents, data science is unusually complicated, with many steps and dependencies necessary to run…

Artificial intelligence has a long history of boom and bust cycles.

During A.I. booms, money flows through universities and industry labs, fueling promised advances that often sound like magic, if not panacea. Extreme optimism was particularly common in the field’s early years. In 1960, for example, A.I. pioneer Herbert Simon suggested that “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do,” a claim echoed by the founder of the field, Marvin Minsky, in 1961.

Despite the advances that have occured since that time — most recently, breakthroughs in neural networks, a form of…

Last year we published Empath, a tool for text analysis, which was fortunate enough to win a Best Paper award at CHI. Empath allows researchers to analyze text over a much larger set of categories than are available in existing lexicons (for example, “violence”, “depression”, or “politics”), and it can generate new lexicons on demand using a model based on neural embeddings and crowdsourcing.

We’ve since released Empath as an open source Python library, and we’d love to have more researchers apply it to their work. …

I read fewer books in 2016 than I have in the past (30 or so novels, which is half what I used to consume during high school or college). Despite this, I still encountered a lot of amazing work. I’ve always enjoyed reading year-end book lists and admired the people who take the time to create them, so it’s been fun to finally make my own.

My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of The Lost Child (Elena Ferrante):

The unmasking of Elena Ferrante made headlines in October…

First impressions matter. Whether you are reading this paragraph, or the first page of a novel, or the introduction of an academic paper, the way something begins can influence your behavior.

Do you decide to buy the novel?

Yes. You’ve fallen in love with the narrative voice.

Do you read the rest of the research paper?

No. You’re totally confused.

What about this essay?

Apparently. Your eyes have gotten this far.

It’s no secret that well written research papers are more likely to be accepted for publication. Good ideas, when packaged badly, will often be misunderstood or misrepresented or otherwise…

When I was a new PhD student, program committee (PC) meetings were colored by a sense of power and mystery. Expert judgements, backroom conversations, and high academic stakes all seemed to come together in a process that would determine the fate of months (or even years) of work. It’s hard to be ambivalent about something like that.

In 2015, I was lucky enough to attend the UIST PC meeting as a student volunteer. Michael, who was on the PC that year, told me it would be an invaluable experience, and despite a few unfortunate details (related to the rejection of…