Results of Deep Funding — Round 1

Jan Horlings
SingularityNET
Published in
7 min readMay 26, 2022

Also available in Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, French

The very first round of Deep Funding has been completed!

This marks a new phase in the SingularityNET ecosystem, where we will foster the growth of the platform by supporting projects with AGIX tokens, knowledge and experience. We are very happy to present the projects that have been selected by our engaged community to be awarded with their requested amounts.

While the portal was open, a total of 47 proposals were submitted for the $1million worth of AGIX token treasury funds, which made this round a fair success! After reviewing the proposals on their formal compliance to the Deep Funding rules, only 28 made it to the voting round. All of these 28 had more than the required 1% of cast votes, but only a minority of 12 proposals received an average grade of 6,5 or higher. As a result of this somewhat conservative grading by our community of token holders, both funds are not depleted, and all of the eligible projects graded higher than 6,5 have been awarded their requested amounts. This result was achieved by a total number of 186,264,155 votes, cast from 158 individual wallets. Note that the number of votes includes tokens that have been used to vote on multiple projects.

All in all, we are very happy with the result and the overall smooth process of this first round. We would like to thank all token holders that took the effort to review the proposals, give feedback and engage in constructive conversations on our social channels. We are proud of you and we are looking forward to more conversations! We appreciate and need your feedback to help us improve the Deep Funding processes and tools, so we can continue to seed the platform with new and valuable AI services.

We congratulate all the winning proposals, and for those who couldn’t make it this time, keep your proposals ready and refined for the Deep Funding Round 2 which will be coming after the summer..

Let’s take a look at the winners and what’s next for Deep Funding moving forward.

All proposals that have been awarded by our community

Avatar 2 Human Learning: Net Zero and Carbon Negative Emissions — $150,000 awarded
“The project is targeted at training students on complex advanced carbon sequestration technology in an immersive environment. It features the development of 3 services focused on 1) avatar speech recognition, 2) immersive learning, and 3) sign language, to be Unity and Unreal immersive engines in real-time or to augment other services”.
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Risk-Aware Data Generation for SingularityNet Applications — $115,000 awarded
Photrek will provide a Coupled Variational Autoencoder as a service for the SingularityNet community. This algorithm has the ability to fill gaps in real-world data as a crucial issue in improving the pipeline of machine learning forecasting capability. It will provide simulated interpolation of these gaps that can be tuned based on the degree of risk desired for the model.
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Simply AI with Trust — $144,000 awarded
Zero2AI aims to select the best usable API-based AI services on different repositories, including SingularityNET’s decentralized AI platform, and offer them as curated microservices linked to an NFT. The goal is to make AI accessible to a non-technical audience right on their smartphones. The proposition includes auto-curation of AI models and bias detection.
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Grammar-Guided Genetic Programming — $40,000 awarded
Many real-world tasks can be formulated as ‘optimization problems’. This solution offers a general-purpose optimization service that uses methods from the field of evolutionary computation that allows searching for optimal programs in any formal language including Python, C++, Rust, as well as domain-specific languages such as HTML, JSON and Protobuf.
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Risk-aware Assessments of AI Algorithms — $35,000 awarded
A suite of assessment tools to assure that ML/AI algorithms effectively manage risk. Contrary to typically used assessments, it will account for nonlinear risk tolerances required for real-life applications, thus avoiding overconfident forecasting.
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Hetzerk: Decentralized Physics Simulations — $40,000 awarded
A decentralized protocol for the simulation of physical systems leveraging Nunet and SingularityNet for computation and AI services. Featuring end-to-end integration of multi-scale simulations for developing and employing theoretical and AI algorithms built up from heterogeneous data sources, symbolic knowledge extraction, and cognitive principles.
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Evolutionary Search For Robust Trading Strategies — $40,000 awarded
A specific use case that builds on the “Grammar-guided genetic programming” proposal, offering a service where users can provide data plus various preferences to the algorithm and it will return evolved trading strategies that perform well on historical data and have a reasonably high chance to perform similarly well on live markets.
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H+DAO Transhumanist Decentralized Projects — $40,000 awarded
Develop and launch a DAOMatcher DApp’, that will interpret social media posts and profiles of various individuals to infer their potential interest in H+DAO projects, by analyzing open online textual information sources using natural language models.
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Museverse: Music Into The Metaverse — $40,000 awarded
Create an AI for analyzing musical instruments from physical space and projecting them in real-time into virtual reality, starting with a piano keyboard. This solution will provide an opportunity for creating VR applications for playing, composing, and collaborating on music in VR.
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Anti-Fakenews Analytics App — Mawu.Analyst — $40,000 awarded
Mawu.ai is a decentralized anti-fake news platform on Cardano and SingularityNET that trains users on how to read news mindfully, spot manipulation, and rewards them financially if they’re good and consistent in it. To make this sustainable, this project will provide subscription-based detailed analytical dashboards with fake news-related insights generated by the AI backend of Mawu.ai.
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Universal Sentence Parser — $22,000 awarded
A service that splits a text into sentences, according to a given dictionary, in a fast and robust way, and can be applied to natural and artificial languages. It will use algorithms based on graph theory to determine all ways a given text can be split into sentences. The result is a truly universal sentence splitter that works independently of language or even the alphabet.
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Zrush — A Hybrid Control System For Robot Swarms — $40,000 awarded
ZRush aims to extend swarm intelligence and multi-agent mechanics to real-world practical applications by designing a control system for swarms of robots that combines autonomous swarm behaviour with human piloting and decision-making. It focuses on precision, reliability, and flexibility and aims at overcoming the issues that currently limit the use of robot swarms in real-life scenarios.
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Find detailed information on the voting statistics in this Google sheet.

What’s next?

First of all, we will organize a meeting with the awarded teams and discuss the path forwards. We will make sure all formalities are covered, like creating a proper contract and a document that outlines the project’s milestone plan. Although some legal documentation is needed, our attitude in the next phase will be of supporting and coaching the teams in creating value for the platform. We want the teams to be open in their communications, also in case of setbacks or new insights because that will better enable us to help them in creating real-world solutions. In some cases and with mutual consent that may result in some deviation from the original milestones, but always within the boundaries of the Deep Funding goals and the assigned budget.

Other concrete tasks to look out for:

  • We will be adding the milestones of each team to our portal and keep them up to date with their actual progress
  • In the coming weeks, we will organize a town hall-like session where the teams will be able to present themselves and connect with the community.
  • We aim to set up a support group of specialists within SingularityNET to help the teams become successful
  • The teams are responsible to report progress, but we will check in with them with some regularity by means of a simple survey, so we can keep track of their progress and wellbeing separately from the milestones.
  • We will ask the teams on these occasions if there are things they need help with from the community. Also, community members are welcome to offer support pro-actively.

What about the next round?

There is a lot to learn in this first round! We are already having meaningful conversations on our social channels, and we hope to increase those and create a list of possible improvements.

Depending on the kind of improvements, we may organize a vote on some fundamentals regarding the process and rules in the next rounds of Deep Funding. Besides that, there will be smaller but relevant functional improvements to our portals and voting environment.

We want to give this process sufficient time so we can collect feedback and implement improvements before embarking on the next round. Therefore, we expect the next round to start after the summer holidays. But in the meantime, there will be plenty to do, both in coaching and supporting the awarded teams and in exchanging ideas for improvements with the organization.

Congratulations and Welcome… and Don’t Forget Deep Funding Round 2

We are excited to welcome the 12 proposals that won the grant during Deep Funding round 1 to SingularityNET’s great ecosystem. This funding process represents a beautiful beginning of collaboration between SingularityNET and the winning projects; we are also grateful to our beloved community for showing such tremendous support to all the projects, and a big round of applause and gratitude goes to those who won but also those who submitted a proposal that didn’t get elected in this round.

To everyone who was not awarded, we encourage you to take learnings from this round, adapt your project and submit your new or improved proposal. Deep Funding round 2 will be coming in Q3 2022. To stay updated and be constantly notified of Deep Funding R2 and the proposal process, keep an eye on SingularityNET’s channels for announcements. See you there!

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