Dear Singularitarian,

Newly elected Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali of Ethiopia was elected on a mandate of transformational change and has promised a new era for Ethiopia and the African continent. Ethiopians are jubilant and excited about the future as Abiy launches significant political and economic reforms. Abiy Ahmed and his team are building towards a vision that embraces all Ethiopians and facilitates their effective participation in the global economy.

Why is this relevant?

When our team visited the beautiful city of Addis Ababa two weeks ago, we were energized by the passion of her people and also their unwavering optimism and faith in the future. Sophia echoed our sentiments too and Dr. Ben Goertzel had in-depth discussions with Abiy and his team. We believe that the PM’s team is embodying that promise and they are acutely aware as to how outsized a role AI will play in upskilling Ethiopia’s talented population. We cannot, however, be naive about a technological utopia and need to mitigate against the unplanned consequences that could arise as Ethiopia builds towards a more democratic future. Our very own Betelhem Dessie, puts it eloquently, "You have to be smarter than the machines that you’re using.”

All of this is relevant as we partner closely with our Ethiopian counterparts and have high-level discussions on building a decentralized ecosystem in Ethiopia. How do we co-build a benevolent AI-centered community? How can AI leapfrog Ethiopia and serve the African continent better? What can we learn about AI from our talented Ethiopian counterparts? How can blockchain serve the people of Ethiopia?

We are committed to Ethiopia and continue to invest in our office and research at iCog labs through SingularityNet. Check out more coverage here and get-in-touch if you’d like to learn more. For future editions of this newsletter, we’ll also be adding an Africa bulletin, where we’ll update you on our progress.

Here’s the TL;DR version for June and early July

Leading with Tech

We had 17 repositories live on GitHub reported in June. Today, we’ve hit 27 public repos as we continue to build our platform. We are inviting early adopters to have a look at our code repositories and get involved.

Here’s a bit about our Roadmaps:

Platform Roadmap. The SingularityNET platform is the core infrastructure that allows the network to function. AI services will use this infrastructure to communicate and transact. The platform roadmap outlines our development progress for each network component. You can view this roadmap here. AI Services Roadmap. While anyone can launch and monetize AI services using the SingularityNET platform, we have an internal team of 50+ researchers that will be seeding the network with an initial batch of services. The AI Services Roadmap outlines the development progress of these services. You can view this roadmap here. Research Initiatives Roadmap. The components outlined in the Research Initiatives Roadmap consist of core research areas that will strengthen the long-term AI capabilities of our network, primarily by supporting and improving the components detailed in our Platform and Services Roadmaps. You can view this roadmap here.

We are also very excited to have published the SingularityNET Simulation. The project simulation package is an arena, much like the OpenAI gym, where developers can submit machine learning and reinforcement learning solutions to a problem to test their algorithms. AI researcher Debbie Duong discusses how community members can help build SingularityNET by using its own simulation in this blog post. Check it out on GitHub here.

Business

Strategic Partnerships

We continue to build momentum and have identified key partners to scale the growth and distribution of our platform. Here are a few that we publicly announced (More in the works for Q3!)

DeepBrain Chain is a blockchain-driven AI computing platform. Our primary goal will be to allow users to access data and intelligent processing on either platform, via back-end interactions between the platforms. Shivom is a decentralized platform creating the world’s largest genomic data hub. AI agents on SingularityNET that require genomic or other biological data to complete tasks will be able to request such datasets from Shivom. In return, if a Shivom customer requests that AI analytics are to be performed on their medical data - Shivom network will be able to access such AI analytics services via SingularityNET. DBrain is a blockchain platform turning raw data into AI for businesses. DBrain will be integrating its data labeling platform for seamless use on SingularityNET. Our partnership with Dbrain will instantly add thousands of algorithms and contributors to our marketplace. Together with Dbrain, SingularityNET is now an end-to-end AI development platform with immediate use-cases.

Team

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Hilen Amin will be joining the executive team as VP of AI Solutions. Dr. Hilen has more than 20 years of experience designing AI solutions for Jaguar, BuildDirect, Symphony Teleca, and more.

AI Research Lab

The AI Research Lab will give you insider access to the most exciting AI initiatives we have under development. Our researchers published some very interesting articles this month:

Press & Events

Dr. Ben Goertzel, Sophia, and other team members continued to represent SingularityNET via various events and interviews in June. Some of the notable media mentions and interviews include:

Our partnership with Shivom was mentioned in GenomeWeb

Blockchain News & Crypto Briefing carried news about our partnership with DeepBrain Chain

Venturebeat’s excellent feature and a long-form interview with Dr. Ben Goertzel on Why we needed to democratize AI to survive it

Prime Minister of Ethiopia Meets with SingularityNET members

Futurists in Ethiopia are betting on artificial intelligence to drive development

Video - Rise of AI Conference 2018: Dr. Ben Goertzel - AI On Steroids

Upcoming Events

Dr. Ben Goertzel will be the keynote speaker at Human-Level AI 2018 Conference, scheduled in Prague, on the 22nd of August, 2018.

Members of the community who plan to attend the conference can use this 10% off-full-price discount code: SNETHLAI2018

If you would like to meet us in-person, please register on the SingularityNET Community Forum to get an alert when we post it on the bulletin.

Here’s a short list of upcoming events that we will be attending:

15 July: Humanity+ China Conference

16 July: SingularityNET’s VR Community Lecture

18-19 July: Future in the City, Moscow

2 August: Startup Grind, Shenzen

22-25 August: Human Level AI 2018, Prague

21 September: RAADFest 2018, San Diego

Community News

VR Meetings

Community member Tim Richmond organized a series of VR events held in Virtual Reality, where he has delivered three parts of a four-part lecture, centered on human advancements using technology from the dawn of civilization to the technological singularity. Tim has managed to achieve trending VR events on AltspaceVR for a while now. The next event is coming up and you should not miss out. You can read more about his events here.

Initial Reputation Staking

Community member FractalUniverse proposed an interesting possible feature to enhance the utility of AGI tokens. You can read more about it here on the forum. Do you also have an interesting idea for SingularityNET? Please share it with us on the forum!

SingularityNET Distributes Volunteer Bounties!

Although we value every community member, there are some who have gone above and beyond in helping us. We are pleased to announce that we have distributed volunteer bounties as a small thank you to our community.



thank you for all your efforts…

We are deeply grateful to have such a talented group of people helping us in our mission. And we request the community to appreciate the hard work being done by:

Eddy (@Input_output_System, @pythonation on Telegram)

Goncalo Gomez (@goncalondr on Telegram)

Rustam (@Rustam)

Pedro Esperanca

Cassandria D (@Cassandria)

Fernando Topaz

malexaffey (@malexaffey)

Aderson Osoria (@Aderson, @Daimen1 on Telegram)

Tim Richmond (@Tim, @Tim_Richmond on Telegram)

Nils (@NilsPCE on Telegram)

Anton (@antonLENR on Telegram)

Vladmir (B0B@n) (@B0ban, @bobanvorobey on Telegram)

Ludovic Chamonaz

Paul Rigby (@Paul_Rigby on Telegram)

Sebastian Keller

Fabio

Danny Lee (@DannyLeeAwesome)

Zolgo (@Zolgo)

Bryan

Olga Lipina (@oa.lipina)

Simon Schurrle (@sitischu)

Darwin (@wattgem on Telegram)

Pascal #A095F

John (@johnkxq on Telegram),

Luk

Arubay #A095F (@Arubay1 on Telegram)

Martin D (@gettingai on Telegram)

weiss (@minikills on Telegram).

Joe Coope (@Justjoe)

Tom #A095F

Thank you to everyone above who in no particular order has:

Fought bot armies on Telegram and Twitter Kept out fake news by removing trolls and scammers Moderated our chats and Telegram groups and curated the right discussions Answered FAQs from newbies (for the umpteenth time) Civilly and effectively engaged in open dialogue and civil discourse Done many many more things like translations

We are working on building an official volunteer partner program where you will be able to work closely together with the team on furthering SingularityNET goals. Send an email to ibby@singularitynet.io and copy in Arif@singularitynet.io with your CV and we’ll get back to you when our program launches.

We are hiring.

As our network matures, we will be opening up more ways for you to become directly involved.

We are now hiring Partnership Managers across the following locations: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul. The Job description can be found here: If you think you’re a good fit please write to jobs@singularitynet.io with your CV.

Be sure to join our Telegram Channel (now also in Korean), participate in our Community Forum, or monitor these email updates to avoid missing out.

Thank you for your continued support.

To the Singularity and beyond,

The SingularityNET Team