What problems/hacks will you solve using AI or Blockchain?

Published in

inspiringbrilliance

5 min readOct 3, 2018

We, at Sahaj, host a yearly hackathon, DEVMERGE, partnering withTIE Chennai to bring the hackers and technologists in Chennai under one roof to learn, network, build out new ideas using the latest and greatest technology trends. For this year’s edition, we are focussing on experimenting with ideas in the AI/ML and Blockchain technology areas. The event comprises of 3 phases — Submission Phase, Selection Phase and the hack days (24 hours). A jury comprising of seasoned technologists and mentors evaluate the final ideas and deserving winners win prizes upto 3 lakhs.

One of the goals of this hackathon is to give developers (with or without past experience) a chance to envision

how the power of distributed ledger technology can improve transparency, efficiency in enterprises and government processes — moving beyond “cryptocurrency” use cases.
how AI/ML can solve real problems in a human way

Have an idea that you want to hack?

Register at: https://devday.in/devmerge

(Or)

Do you want to hack to learn and explore these technologies? Below, we list a few exciting ideas/hacks in these areas as well as some useful links for anyone to get started.

Blockchain

There is a lot of hype associated with distributed ledger technology collectively called as ‘Blockchain’. They are widely expected to disrupt existing industries and lead to the creation of new types of companies.

The types of problems that blockchains can solve are plenty, across several industries and contexts. Some industry examples include:

Royalties and IP ownership — When consumers buy a publisher’s content online or from retail stores, the transactions will be recorded on the blockchain and royalty amount decided as per the smart contract. The publishers and distributors will have access to all relevant data. https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/06/21/microsoft-and-ey-launch-blockchain-for-copyrights-and-royalties/
Identity and Ownership Management — Everledger provides provenance tracking and verification for a variety of luxury goods, providing customers information about the source and quality of the goods.
Supply Chain — TradeLens Shipping giant Maersk and IBM jointly created a real life digital ledger for global shipping.

Some inspiring ideas/hacks we have seen:

Niti Aayog Blockchain hackathon winning hack — chAIn — https://github.com/Riksi/chAIn chAIn allows Machine Learning models to be trained on patient healthcare data, customers’ bank statements, etc. without “seeing” the data. It uses a special form of encryption known as “Homomorphic Encryption” to encrypt models so that clients and patients can train those models with their data offline, and then submit encrypted gradients back to the model owner without needing to send any of their data. You can find more at https://yourstory.com/2017/11/blockchain-for-societal-good/
https://github.com/upperwal/OpenComplaintNetwork — OCN is a public redressal system and open police complain filing system on Ethereum Blockchain.
DEVMERGE 2017 winner idea — Blockchain-based platform for bill discounting/invoice trading — built using Ethereum, IPFS.
Blockchaingers 2018 winning hack — Unchain — a blockchain solution to register and monitor the distribution of medicine. https://hackathon.blockchaingers.org/

Some useful links/libraries:

Truffle, for Smart Contracts built on Ethereum

Truffle is a development framework that makes the coding, compilation, and publishing of Ethereum smart contracts to a private testnet or public net a whole lot easier. Get started with the links below.

Docs: http://truffleframework.com/docs/

Sample Code: https://github.com/sahajsoft/devday_blockchain

Tutorials: http://truffleframework.com/tutorials/

Note: To build a full-stack dApp on top of your Ethereum smart contracts, you need a front-end layer capable of calling functions on your smart contracts from a user interface on a mobile app or a web app. That’s where web3.js comes in. The following github repo has code that walks through end-to-end dApp development using Truffle for the contracts layer and web3 for interface to the front-end — https://github.com/sahajsoft/devday_blockchain

Fabric SDK, for Smart Contracts and dApps built on Hyperledger Fabric

Hyperledger Fabric is a framework for distributed ledger solutions on permissioned networks (different from the public/non-permissioned blockchains of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and ideal for enterprise use cases where all participating entities are known and trusted), hosted by the Linux Foundation, and contributed to by IBM and a consortium of other firms.

QuickStart Guide: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-ibm-blockchain-101-quick-start-guide-for-developers-bluemix-trs/index.html

Writing Smart Contracts / Chaincode:

http://hyperledger-fabric.readthedocs.io/en/latest/chaincode4ade.html

https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric-samples/tree/master/chaincode

Writing dApps that invoke Chaincode:

http://hyperledger-fabric.readthedocs.io/en/latest/write_first_app.html

https://github.com/IBM-Blockchain/marbles

https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric-samples/tree/release/fabcar

EOS Chain

EOS is a programmable blockchain offering smart contract computation. It is developed by a company called block.one. Compared to other live blockchains, EOS introduces a different approach to solving scalability and usability, both of which are essential in building industrial grade applications. EOS is aiming to become the go-to blockchain platform for applications requiring high throughput and low latency. It supports multiple enterprise-grade features like accounts, role based permission control, parallel execution, zero transaction fees, inter blockchain protocols etc. It can scale to support higher throughput of 4K/5K transactions/sec.

Within few months of its release, there are lot of buzz around this chain and adoption is gradually increasing on it. Many dApps are getting built. There is a lot of community support and future looks great so far.

Github: https://github.com/EOSIO/eos

WhitePaper : https://github.com/EOSIO/Documentation/blob/master/TechnicalWhitePaper.md

Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning:

There is a lot of experimentation and progress being made in this area. Some examples leveraging AI/ML for making an impact:

Education

Education is an ever evolving space where we always thrive to get better by the use of technologies. AI/ML can help improve learning experience and make learning more inclusive and engaging. Here are some examples of work happening in this space:

Software development

As developers we are constantly in the lookout for things that can ease our lives in developing software. Be it containers for infrastructure or intellisense for IDEs, they immensely add value to our daily chores. AI/ML can be leveraged to the maximum benefit of developer community. Here are some examples of work happening in this space:

Other impactful ideas or applications

Google Duplex — AI System to accomplish real tasks over the phone.

Here is a blog from Dantin Kakkar at Sahaj Software Sol. discussing the principles for developing solutions for deep learning/artificial intelligence problems in Computer Vision.

A few libraries and services in AI/ML which you would run across inevitably:

https://keras.io/ — Keras is a high-level, abstracted deep learning framework which works upon TensorFlow, Theano, and a couple of other “lower-level” deep learning frameworks.
Hosted service for various ML — https://algorithmia.com/
Google’s public data search tool box
List of datasets for ML
OpenCV
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cognitive-toolkit/
http://torch.ch/
https://www.ibm.com/watson/

Curious to know more? Visit https://devday.in/devmerge

DEVMERGE 2018 is all set to happen on the October 27 and 28th. Kindly bring your ideas, energy and win prizes worth upto 3 lakhs. Come join us and build for the billions with Blockchain and AI