Longenesis - a Hong Kong-based operator that targets healthcare applications powered by deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology - announced a partnership with Estonia-based Neuromation to convert cryptographic mining infrastructure into a massive cloud for deep learning applications.

The Longenesis project started as a partnership between the blockchain technology company Bitfury and Insilico Medicine , a medical AI company. The two companies collaborate to study and develop blockchain and AI solutions, with a technology stack that includes Bitfury's Exonum blockchain platform, for sharing, managing, tracking and validating healthcare data, said Bitfury founder and CEO Valery Vavilov, as reported by Reuters in August 2017. The Reuters story notes that according to research firm Frost and Sullivan in a recent study, the AI market for healthcare is expanding by an annual rate of 40 percent and that global revenue generated by AI is expected to grow to $6.7 billion by 2021 from $811 million in 2015.

At Exponential Medicine 2017 , a high-profile futuristic medicine event hosted by Singularity University in San Diego, Alex Zhavoronkov, CEO of Insilico Medicine and CSO of Longenesis, gave a talk on next-generation artificial intelligence and blockchains for health and longevity . A research paper titled " Converging blockchain and next-generation artificial intelligence technologies to decentralize and accelerate biomedical research and healthcare " was recently published in Oncotarget .

"We are excited to partner with Neuromation," said Zhavoronkov. "We previously published with their CSO and hold their research capabilities in high regard. Our collaboration is two-fold. First, to train the deep neural networks we need processing power and we are looking to repurpose the cryptocurrency mining equipment to do that. Second, to generate synthetic data, one must train on large data sets of real-world data and have balanced and diverse data sets, so Neuromation is an obvious consumer of data and can be a part of the marketplace."

According to the Longenesis press release , high-performance computing solutions are needed to train deep neural networks - that is, multilayered neural networks, optimized for deep learning and able to learn from training data with only limited supervision for personalized medicine and drug developments applications. Neuromation wants to repurpose the high-performance computing power in existing cryptocurrency mining infrastructures for deep learning applications and become a leading provider of cloud solutions for AI.

"Here at Neuromation, we are developing a platform that will democratize AI development by making the computational resources more accessible to AI practitioners; the computational power will come mostly from cryptocurrency miners wishing to earn more from their GPU farms and/or diversify their business," said Neuromation CEO Maxim Prasolov. "But even if you do have the computational power, you still have to have the data to train machine learning models on."

Neuromation's business model is centered on selling synthetic datasets for deep neural network training, deep learning models and distributed computing power to train the models.

As described in the Neuromation white paper , the Neuromation platform will use distributed computing and blockchain-based proof-of-work tokens for AI development, combining all the components necessary to build deep learning solutions with synthetic data in one place. Platform service providers, commercial or private, will be able to auction synthetic datasets, distributed computing services, and machine learning models, and negotiate prices directly with customers. Data generation and computing services will be rewarded in Neuromation's NeuroToken (NTK).

In January, Neuromation announced that all issued Neurotokens (NTK) had been sold out after just eight hours of public sale, netting $50 million. In February, Neuromation announced that the first functional version of its platform is online and it invited miners to register.

"The primary aim of Longenesis is to create a global data marketplace that will help provide personalized - but at the same time secure - data for healthcare application developers," said Sergey Nikolenko, chief research officer of Neuromation. "Hence, the missions of Neuromation and Longenesis are perfectly complementary to each other. Together we will bring to AI practitioners in medicine and healthcare both the data and the computational power needed to train AI models and improve healthcare throughout the world. By announcing this partnership, we are laying the foundation for the future world of individualized healthcare based on artificial intelligence."

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.