Flowchain aims to build a revolutionary AIoT blockchain framework for ecological restoration.

Delivering AI, IoT, and blockchain solutions for environmental sustainability enabled by smartphone cameras.

According to the Fifth Assessment Report created by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environmental Program, temperatures have reached new record highs due to carbon pollution that is directly linked to human activities. The World Economic Forum has further indicated that issues such as climate change, unsafe levels of air pollution, depletion of forests, fishing and freshwater stocks, toxins in rivers and soils, overflowing levels of waste on land and in oceans, and loss of biodiversity and habitats have caused serious impacts on global species and their future generations.

Blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI), known as the emerging technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, are expected to have the potential to support environmental sustainability. Blockchain is a technical solution that can store, verify, and exchange data through the distributed nodes without a third party. Blockchain’s encryption makes it difficult to tamper with data after storage on the chain, thereby increasing reliability and simplifying the process of data exchange. IoT, on the other hand, describes the network of physical objects, i.e., “things.” These objects are usually embedded with sensors, software, and other technologies to connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the internet. The data collected by the IoT devices can be further analyzed to train AI models and eventually to find solutions without human intervention.

In the past few years, scientists and IoT companies have inserted a tremendous number of sensors in the farms and natural environments to collect environmental data such as humidity, temperature, rainfall, and other measurements to build AI models. Moreover, some data are also stored on the blockchain to conduct food traceability. The initial results have brought the first wave of industrial upgrades for agriculture and the improvement of food safety issues. However, an overabundance of sensors designed for this purpose and the lack of a proper recycling system would only exacerbate existing technology pollution issues, i.e., more electronic garbage or e-waste.

Flowchain, an IoT Blockchain company based in Singapore, is aware of this dilemma. Jollen Chen, Flowchain’s founder and CEO, said, “IoT should not be just a composition of sensors and dashboards. The purpose of science and technology should be people-oriented and nature-oriented, especially when we are discussing agriculture and ecological conservation.”

In early 2019, Flowchain proposed a project named “Ecological Data on Chain” to store the collected environmental data on Flowchain’s blockchain and further analyze the data with Flowchain’s computing pool 24 hours a day to train machine learning for automatic biometric models.

To eliminate the e-waste issue of redundant sensors, Flowchain developed an alternative method of collecting data, that is, to collect photos taken by tourists’ smartphone cameras with consent. The penetration rate of smartphones reached 70.4% in Taiwan in 2017, according to Newzoo’s report, “Top 50 countries by smartphone users.” It is common for tourists to take photos during sightseeing. Also, the performance of smartphone cameras advances every year. Therefore, by combining tourists’ photos with those taken by environmental protection volunteers and researchers — including GPS data — Flowchain can build a mega database from reliable sources audited by the company’s patented technology, PPKI.

Moreover, Flowchain aims to build an open database so that everyone can utilize, share, and contribute images and videos in the database. Using the open database, researchers can track the ecological footprint of animals and plants to understand changes in a certain environment efficiently at a low cost. For educational purposes, users can identify the species of animals they have photographed and read background information by retrieving data in near real-time with Flowchain’s distributed storage virtualization technology. Flowchain calls this new project, “Photo and Search.”

Flowchain anticipates creating a “responsible blockchain ecosystem” by building an environmentally sustainable economy and looks forward to applying the technologies to more scenarios to create a better planet for future generations.

Press Release: https://prn.to/383Id2f

About Flowchain

Flowchain is an IoT blockchain that leverages distributed ledger technology (DLT) for peer-to-peer IoT networks and real-time data transactions. Flowchain’s PPKI technology provides random and unique public keys in real-time for tokenized hardware that enables the fast and safe transfer of transacted digital assets without the need for intermediaries. Moreover, the Virtual Blocks technology proposed by Flowchain ensures chunked data (data streams) transactions in a near-instant manner and can be integrated with IPFS, an emerging distributed storage blockchain. Virtual Blocks enables Flowchain to work as an off-chain mechanism to ensure the security and validity of data through tokenized IoT hardware. Flowchain’s original AIOT (AI + IoT) hybrid blockchain technology and several other technologies, including tokenized hardware, have gradually completed the global patent layout.

Flowchain is also the only blockchain company in Taiwan that currently has completed legal compliance and has been successfully listed on major global exchanges with its own blockchain technology.