FLock.io, a leader in the decentralized AI (dAI) movement, has been awarded a prestigious grant from The Ethereum Foundation (EF) as the sole AI infrastructure recipient of the Academic Grants Round 2024. This grant will support FLock.io’s research into incentive mechanisms for smart contract-enabled blockchain solutions, aiming to revolutionize decentralized AI through secure and efficient blockchain integrations.
- About The Ethereum Foundation and the Academic Grants Round 2024:
- The Ethereum Foundation is a non-profit organization that supports the Ethereum ecosystem by funding protocol development, growing the ecosystem, and advocating for Ethereum.
- The Academic Grants Round 2024 is a $1M initiative aimed at supporting Ethereum-related academic research, with FLock.io being the sole AI infrastructure recipient.
- FLock.io’s Vision and Recent Milestones:
- FLock.io specializes in federated machine learning on the blockchain, creating a unique collaborative dAI training platform with on-chain governance, AI model training, and hosting.
- Recently raised $6 million in a seed round to further its mission of decentralizing AI and redistributing power from centralized entities to community hands.
- Founded by a group of Oxford graduates, this London-based Web3 startup is setting new standards in decentralized AI innovation.
- Research Focus: Incentive Mechanisms for Decentralized AI:
- The grant will enable FLock.io to optimize incentive tokenomics to prevent malicious activities in the decentralized AI development lifecycle.
- FLock.io’s research aims to harness smart contracts for secure dAI systems, maintaining principles of security, trust, and computational integrity, while ensuring data privacy.
- Key research leads include Dr. Zhipeng Wang, lead blockchain researcher at FLock.io, and Jiahao Sun, FLock Founder and CEO, who also serves as a Research Fellow at Imperial College London.
- Foundational Research and Publications:
- FLock.io’s work builds on previous research published in the IEEE’s Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, specifically addressing defenses against poisoning attacks in federated learning using blockchain.
- Proposes a peer-to-peer voting and reward-and-slash system to safeguard against malicious activities by participants in federated learning.
- Additional notable research includes “zkFL: Zero-Knowledge Proof-based Gradient Aggregation for Federated Learning” and “GARNN: An Interpretable Graph Attentive Recurrent Neural Network for Predicting Blood Glucose Levels via Multivariate Time Series.”
- FLock.io’s Ecosystem and Future Goals:
- FLock.io is pioneering the end-to-end AI fine-tuning lifecycle in Web3, similar to a decentralized version of Hugging Face.
- The ecosystem includes components like AI Arena, FL Alliance, and Model Marketplace, fostering a competitive environment for AI model development and validation.
- Currently, the AI Arena is in closed beta, allowing developers to test their models in a Kaggle-style leaderboard format, utilizing both centralized and decentralized computational resources.
FLock.io is driving the decentralized AI movement forward by integrating blockchain technology with federated learning, focusing on security, efficiency, and community empowerment. The Ethereum Foundation grant will further fuel FLock.io’s innovative research, supporting the creation of secure, decentralized AI systems that leverage smart contracts for optimal incentive mechanisms. For those interested in exploring the future of AI on blockchain, FLock.io’s latest white paper provides in-depth insights into cutting-edge approaches and solutions.
