iExec Dev Letter #2: AI on Ethereum — 31 May 2017

Welcome to the bi-monthly iExec development letter! What have we done those past 15 days: organizing, recruiting, and releasing.

Project Management

Execution is key to success, and development is not a scalable process per se. All developers know that organization is key, and good project management procedure should be implemented as early as possible.

Mircea has worked with two specialists on defining and implementing project management procedures. In short:

• PM enforces close cooperation between marketing and development teams
• PM allows to scale up to much bigger team
• inclusion of external projects
• use state of the art and well proven agile methods
• implemented using Jira/Trello/slack/google apps

Recruitments

We’re shaping a team for the next five years, able to tackle the most challenging issues of blockchain and distributed computing. Our objectives : scalability, security, reproducibility, simplicity and innovation!

Thus we are researching various profiles, not only based on technical skills, but also on experience (from Yoda to Padawan), problem solving ability (from PhD theoreticians to self learning open source hackers), and work culture (from crypto activists to nuclear plant engineers).

Now working on core software development : Oleg, Gilles, Mehdi, Jorge, Hamid.

Now joining the team:

• François is a senior Java developer and a true specialist of CD/CI, where he had years of experience of running production software and infrastructure for large industrial companies. Furthermore, François has started solidity development a couple of months ago, and he participated to the crowdsale smart contract bug bounty providing us top-notch security evaluation. Overall with iExec, François has taken the responsibility of making things work!
• Ishak is a junior full stack developer, still student at the famous school 42 in France. Ishak has handled the tasks of helping with front-end development and providing developper libraries, contributing to the bridge backend.

Hiring in progress:

• Ux/UI graphic designer
• Senior full stack developer with experience in javascript, NodeJS, react, python
• Senior Java-Cloud developer with focus on microservices and related technologies

Future outstanding talents seeking:

• Security research engineer (PhD), with strong background in applied cryptography (ssh, pgp, PKI, zk proofs, MPC, …), authentication/authorization framework (Oauth, openID, SAML,…), security of distributed systems (IDS, firewall,…), SELinux & sandboxing, Intel SGX, secure elements, etc…
• Distributed system research engineer (PhD), with strong background in large scale distributed protocol/system design and implementation. If you know what FLP85 and Akka mean, contact us immediately :-)
• OpenCL/Cuda developper with experience in GPU machine learning/deep learning framework (TensorFlow, Theano, Singa) and/or GPU rendering (Blender, Luxrender).
• Ethereum, Solidity developper with strong knowledge of Ethereum internals (protocol, smart contract, EVM, PoS, Raiden)

Software development

Do you remember this excellent blog post by Paul Grau, at that time student at TU Berlin ? In his post, Paul reports on the challenges of implementing a simple human players chess game on Ethereum. The challenge comes from the fact that developers often have part of their algorithm that are too computational intensive to be implemented within solidity smart contract. In the case of the chess game, it was the function which was testing the end of the game.

With iExec, developers can execute part of their computation off-chain, thus removing any Ethereum virtual machine limitations. Dapps have now access to the computing capacities they need for their execution !

Today we are very happy to answer Paul’s blog post by proposing the first smart contract that allows to play against one the chess artificial intelligence: stockfish. Jorge has integrated the open source stockfish chess engine within iExec and developed the corresponding smart contract that bridges the AI with Ethereum.

You can read the full story here, and play against the demo. Signup for our newsletter if not done yet and join our slack to discuss this premiere : AI meets blockchain ;-)