The Aigents Personal Social and Media Analytics Platform Goes Open Source.
After 4 years of development, Aigents is finally available on Github.
Aigents as a new standard
In 2014, our very own Anton Kolonin first introduced the idea of creating an unbiased social and media analytics platform. Aigents surfaced from that proposal. Aigents is an active project that aims to give any Internet user “an individual trainable software agent” that allows everyone to conduct intelligent searches of information on the Web and to share results with other users privately or within closed or open communities. This social computing platform also removes the burden of ads and “repetitive searches.” Additionally, Aigents is set to become an integral part of SingularityNET as a whole. The Aigents Graphs Framework, for example, allowed us to develop the Unsupervised Language Learning Graphs Demo. The conceptual design of the Reputation Consensus for SingularityNET’s reputation system had also been initiated by earlier work on Aigents which will be central to the mechanism.
Anton Kolonin’s initial proposal was prompted from the observation that existing platforms were not serving the concerned individuals, instead, they served those who manipulate with fake news or reputation gaming and syphon personal information directly or indirectly from individuals. These hidden affordances are all too symptomatic of companies that reject open audits of their products and only incrementally reveal shortcomings of their systems — recent events at Facebook come to mind.
The project has come a long way since Anton’s first pitch, implementing algorithms and tools for online information collection and analysis on platforms, and allowing users to retrieve and make sense of information from online media, social networks, and blockchains. This platform is also set to be integrated into a line of personal and server applications, including Aigents Desktop applications for Windows, Aigents Mobile application for Android, and Aigents Server for Clouds. The Aigents Web Demo in question was shared with a limited audience of 600+ users during the beta testing phase.
Why open source?
Nevertheless, ever since the inception of this project, a common concern has been recurring in discussions with our colleagues, partners, and friends: privacy and security. In short, if this project is to provide personal social media analytics instruments to professionals and claim that they will have their privacy protected and information flows cleaned, we should have a way to prove it. As system builders we should provide enough transparency for anyone to verify that no backdoors exist; that there will be no selling of user experience flows to personal data aggregators; and that Aigents will not be directing manipulative content from advertisers or allowing psychological operations on users.
To address these concerns the decision was made to have the code open-sourced under MIT license. From today onward anyone can review Aigents’ core platform code from a security and privacy perspective, and benefit from using the technology in their applications. The Aigents suite of applications and services will be kept and nurtured on GitHub.
Open source involves publishing our code openly and “using open source technology to improve transparency, flexibility, and accountability”. This will allow for more perspectives to contribute to Aigents and for a continual exchange to happen between the larger community of coders and the project at hand — often resulting in “additional clarity around data that needs to remain protected and how that’s achieved”. As the computer security expert Bruce Schneier asserted, engineers “should demand open source code for anything related to security”. The increase in the number of people that your code is exposed to also means that the code will be more clearly written to facilitate security review and increase the speed of development in certain cases. For instance, in 2018 a backdoor was discovered by the community in an open source SSH package; the discovery spread like wildfire on Reddit and Twitter, and amassed the input of thousands of experts
The open source culture has also been embraced by SingularityNET at large and by many of its associated projects such as OpenCog and iCog, as you will always find our latest developments and collaborations on Github. Fundamentally, our goal is to decentralize AI; it is to increase the sources of supply for AI systems; and it is to inform people about the possibilities of the SingularityNET platform along with its subsidiaries. Open sourcing our work is one way to achieve all that. However, open sourcing also needs to be supplemented by more traditional approaches to the dissemination of information and democratisation of participation, namely, working with major international institutions like UNESCO to teach children about future technologies, or creating new institutions like DAIA that will serve the purpose of fostering synergy within a like-minded community.
How can you get involved?
At the moment, only the Aigents Core Platform is available on this page. This includes core Java code which makes it possible to build server Aigents applications or decentralised networks of Aigents peer-to-peer applications. It also includes JavaScript code that may be useful to build Aigents Web front-ends; the functionally is similar to the one that we offer on Aigents but with varying levels of functionality depending on your needs. Finally, the Aigents Core Platform contains a suite of tests implementing the concept of a “Baby Turing Test” where Artificial Intelligence system is being examined if it can incrementally extend its functions in the course of interactions with its users.
In the future, the scope of the open source Aigents applications will be extended with Mobile Android application, Aigents Web Analytics Portal and more.
Stay tuned for additional news via the Aigents Youtube channel, Aigents on Facebook, Aigents on Steemit and Aigents on Medium. You can also try the Aigents Web Demo now.
SingularityNET has a passionate and talented community which you can connect with by visiting our Community Forum. Feel free to say hello and to introduce yourself here. Exchange ideas, chat with others and share your knowledge with us and other community members on our forum.
We are proud of our developers and researchers that are actively publishing their research for the benefit of the community; you can read the research here.
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