Spotlight: human.ai

An in depth look at some of the projects building on Parcel.

The concept of privacy within the healthcare space has historically been passive about protecting the user — think of HIPAA. Oasis Labs is excited to partner with Human.ai who wants to recenter this conversation to learn as much as possible from every patient journey while protecting patient privacy. By creating a privacy-preserving network of healthcare systems, Human.ai uses Parcel to provide researchers with more higher-quality data and empower data controllers to restrict how their patients’ data is used.

Read more below to learn about Human.ai’s efforts:

Hey Simon! Tell us about yourself and your role at Human.ai.

I’m Simon Overell, the CTO and co-founder of human.ai. I have been lucky to work with some amazing teams over the past 13 years, at Yahoo!, at TrueKnowledge (now Amazon Alexa), spider.io (now anti-malware at Google) and Google, working on AI, applied machine learning, and the many facets of big data. I committed full-time to human.ai at the beginning of 2020 to try to make a dent in hard-to-treat cancers.

Tell us a little bit about Human.ai

The best minds of our generation are still ultimately working in service of advertising. That sucks.*

We want to change this.

Our goal at human.ai is to build an AI marketplace for healthcare and biopharma.

We want to make it possible for the world’s best AI experts to turn our most private, sensitive and valuable healthcare data into life-giving services. Crucially, this must happen without these experts ever having direct access to the data.

We want to provide the incentives necessary for this to happen.

We also want these services to have SaaS simplicity while never leaking any patient data during use. It must be trivially easy for patients, clinicians or biopharma researchers to use these services, but no private data should ever go to the service provider when this happens.

* Apologies, Jeff Hammerbacher

Why is privacy and data sovereignty important for your product?

Data privacy and sovereignty are everything! We want to make it possible for patients and healthcare providers to be exclusive controllers of patient data.

How did you find out about Oasis Labs?

We have been researching decentralised approaches to secure computation since early 2020. The Mainnet and Nebula Genomics announcements led us to focus specifically on Oasis.

What made Parcel a good fit for you?

Parcel puts very few restrictions on what can run in the environment — allowing researchers to run standard bioinformatics tools and libraries. On top of this, we’ve used Parcel’s compute API to provide data controllers with a way to specify exactly how patient data is used and by whom. For instance, data controllers can provide a hard requirement that computations be differentially private.

What’s your favorite thing about Parcel! / Which Parcel feature is most exciting to you?

We’re really excited about the upcoming data-tokenization API. When combined with Parcel’s compute environment and flexible system of grants, it really sets Parcel apart from the competition. Parcel is not the only way to share data using blockchain technologies. There are various utility tokens that can provide access to data, however Parcel lets you share data with the necessary restrictions to preserve privacy and value.

What do you love most about your industry?

The thing I love about health tech is how you can have a huge impact on an individual person’s life. Many big-data projects are focused on delivering a small amount of value to a huge volume of people. Health tech is different, the focus is delivering years of life.

If you’re interested in learning more about human.ai, head to their website: https://human.ai/

Curious about Parcel’s upcoming data tokenization features? Read our updated primer here.