Ocean Protocol, SingularityNET and NTH Opinion have joined efforts to utlilize the latest technologies to outpace the spread of COVID-19 HSV GTS Follow Apr 1 · 6 min read

The CoVIDathon — Decentralised AI against CoVID-19

The extremely unfortunate medical crisis that currently confronts the human species can be expected to have its upsides along with its downsides.

One of the few positive things about crisis situations is the potential they have to bring people together.

The goal of the CoVIDathon is to do whatever we can to leverage the resources of the decentralized AI community to combat the COVID-19 virus and its various consequences.

Put more formally, the mission is: Developing and launching open-source code using AI and/or blockchain to combat COVID-19, reduce risk from future infectious outbreaks and cope with the COVID-19 pandemic situation.

The CoVIDathon is hosted on Devpost, with a dedicated GitHub repository for open collaboration and will initially run for two months​. ​The hackathon will officially start on April 1st and proposals for the first phase can be submitted until May 1st.

Teams that enter the initial prototype stage will go on to the next phase.

Projects, companies and enterprises interested in supporting the initiative are welcome to join as an active or a major supporter.

In order to ensure alignment with the project mission and ethics all requests for collaboration with CoVIDathon will be screened by the project’s founding members.

The organizational work for the hackathon has been driven primarily by Ocean Protocol and SingularityNET during the earliest preliminary stage.

and SingularityNET during the earliest preliminary stage. However, participation during the next phase has been offered by various DAIA member organizations who are coming on board at two different levels:

Level 1: Active Supporter

Providing active technical support for CoVIDathon participants who want to use tools created by a certain member organization’s decentralized AI tech in their work.

Marketing the CoVIDahon in a relevant community.

Leveraging PR resources to help publicise COVIDathon.

Level 2: Major Supporter

Providing developer time from a project’s in-house team via encouraging the project staff to contribute to or launch their own CoVIDathon projects.

Contributing funds (in tokens or cash) to the prize purses for CoVIDathon participants.

Hackathon Tracks

CoVIDathon participants will be invited to contribute to multiple tracks.

An expert panel of judges is currently being assembled including AI, blockchain and medical experts to assess the contributions to each track both at the end of the 2 months as well as progress proceeds incrementally.

CoVIDathon will include four tracks:

Track One: Privacy and Sovereignty

Data is all-important in researching and solving Covid-19, can we get access to the data needed while protecting individuals rights?.

Track Two: Medicine and Epidemiology

Assistive medical and research tools that can help collect, collate and be applied in the fight against Covid-19.

Track Three: Informational and Coping Tools

Covid-19 has led to huge changes in the way people live, what tools can be developed to ease the effects of this?.

Track Four: Open Innovation

Creative thinking is key to our eventual success against Covid-19, this track is for contributions that don’t fit into the other tracks.

How you can get involved

SingularityNET and Ocean Protocol will join AskCo19’s public Slack Workspace (join here). We invite everybody to participate, including:

Physicians

Nurse practitioners

Physician assistants

Blockchain developers

AI/ML engineers

Engineers

Full-stack developers

UX/UI developers

Data scientists

Project managers

Translators

Marketing and business specialists

Branding experts

The three technology companies involved in this partnership

A word from Bruce Pon, Founder Ocean Protocol & Dr Ben Goertzel, CEO SingularityNET, Chief AI Scientist

Ocean Protocol

Ocean Protocol is a decentralized data exchange protocol to unlock data for AI, launched in 2017.

Leveraging blockchain technology Ocean Protocol connects data providers and consumers allowing data to be shared while guaranteeing traceability, transparency and trust for all stakeholders involved.

SingularityNET

The company which built artificial intelligence for the human-like robot Sophia, is a decentralized AI marketplace and fosters the emergence of beneficial general intelligence.

It is a full-stack AI solution powered by a decentralized protocol and led by founder Dr. Ben Goertzel.

Ubiquitous throughout SingularityNET and throughout their team of engineers, scientists, researchers, marketers and entrepreneurs is a mission of decentralization and distributing AI to benefit everyone.

Nth Opinion

Is a AI health startup that originally launched www.AskCo19.com, a platform for physicians and medical professionals on the frontlines to share information about this lethal viral pathogen that currently has no treatment.

This communication tool allows doctors to share knowledge about COVID-19 to patients and other healthcare workers using their personal experiences from the ground.

This website offers knowledge and insight for people around the world with the foresight to help others face the surge and onslaught of COVID-19 in the midst of the pandemic.

What started out as an open-source hackathon in mid-March quickly grew from a small team to a full grassroots non-profit of 200+ united volunteers from around the world working to realize this platform together.

Coder talents will revolutionize the current state of the physician electronic toolbox which have been less than par as well as embarrassingly and devastatingly limited. Coding abilities will help develop tools that do not currently exist and directly contribute to the fight against the pandemic that health-care workers are currently tirelessly fighting around the world.

COVID-19 is spreading faster than we can code and our coding physicians are needed in the field with patients, and cannot complete this globally imperative project quickly enough. Please help us finish our code.

Contribute to Hackathon by submitting issues and contributing code. Submitting issues means sending messages about errors in applications and suggesting ways to fix them. Contributing code involves sending pull requests with your corrections and improvements. If you are interested in joining the coding revolution, visit:

If you are interested in helping us with documentation, translation, design, marketing or community management please join our public Slack channel by clicking on the link below:

Webapp

Why are we doing this?

We believe this partnership enables real-time sharing of critical understanding and insights on how to overcome COVID-19 with treatments, techniques, therapies and agents from people for people across the globe.

When lives are at stake it doesn’t make sense to go through layers of policy and bureaucracy.

We cannot fight this virus with research while waiting for a vaccine.

We need to give passionate physicians a safe place where the risk is distributed so they can share real-time information with each other.

This may be our only chance to win the war against an enemy we cannot see, one that moves faster than research.

Using the power of AI and decentralizing technologies we will match, adapt and outpace the genetic algorithms of the virus.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) Companies That Are Combating The COVID-19 Pandemic