We’ve launched a Global Hackathon with the Indian Government and Indonesia’s Largest Telco!
Get your Hackathon on here!
Perlin has now launched the Perlin AI 4 ALL Global Hackathon in partnership with;
- NITI Aayog: National Institution for Transforming India, the premier policy think tank for the Indian Government, and
- PT Telkom: Indonesia’s largest telecommunications company
The Hackathon was launched at the AI 4 ALL Conference co-hosted by NITI Aayog and the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) in Mumbai on the 15–16th November, 2018.
The Challenge
The Hackathon invites participants to submit ideas on how to meet this challenge:
How AI can be used to have a significant positive social and economic impact and advance India?
The Hackathon is in line with Perlin’s commitment to helping the Indian Government realize its grand ambition for India’s AI future and the more efficient utilisation of its rapidly-growing national computing infrastructure. Run in two stages;
- STAGE 1 — Idea Submissions: submission of ideas addressing how their AI-based solutions can be used to benefit Indian communities
- STAGE 2 — Hack Submissions: participants are required to develop their AI-based solutions from STAGE 1 with a focus on privacy-preserving AI and distributed computing
While the Hackathon is primarily focused on India, Perlin will also work with PT Telkom, Indonesia’s largest telco with 180M users to explore how to implement the Hack Submissions to also benefit communities in Indonesia. With a combined population of 1.6bn people in India and Indonesia (that’s 20% of all humans on earth!), this Hackathon presents itself as a huge opportunity for AI teams to make a real difference in the world.
The grand vision is for innovative AI use cases developed for the Hackathon to be scaled and implemented to help communities in desperate need in developing nations around the world.
Anyone interested in joining the Hackathon can register HERE.
The Perlin team has already partnered with both NITI Aayog and PT Telkom to conduct joint research, facilitate industry and government interaction, exchange valuable learnings, and organise local forums to kickstart positive decentralization and the redistribution of income.
The initial focus of these partnerships is on AI methods such as distributed multi-party computation, and privacy preserving systems that will protect individuals’ data while training predictive models. In both India and Indonesia, this includes assisting Perlin with connections to local firms, support for greater community engagement, and assistance running local workshops and meetups to promote Perlin’s cutting edge distributed computing technology.
Both India and Indonesia have vast pools of technical expertise and emerging developer talent. Both also have equally massive pools of underutilized computing resources in the form of smartphones and computers, which remain largely idle while their owners are not using them (e.g. while they are sleeping).
“Our aim is to tap both these resources, and leverage recent advances in artificial intelligence, to empower all our local developers and tech entrepreneurs to position themselves as global leaders.” explained Mr. Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog, “Partnering with Perlin will provide us access to technology at the very forefront of innovation in AI, Machine Learning, distributed computing and blockchain technology.”
As a source of significantly cheaper, secure, reliable and socially conscious cloud computing, we want our decentralized platform to support the work of the world’s brightest AI developers.
However, this also is inherently focused on the sharing economy and the redistribution of income in a more fair, transparent and democratic way. So by redistributing the huge revenues in the cloud market estimated to be worth $300B by 2021, we will empower struggling communities globally to achieve greater social and economic inclusion.
At a minimum, the Hackathon will allow us to connect with 100’s if not 1000’s of AI/ML companies, startups, companies and project teams around the world — all of whom will be potential suppliers or users of compute power for the Perlin Network.
