EFFECT.AI (DECENTRALIZED NETWORK FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE)

What does the company/project do?
The artificial intelligence market is growing at an increasing rate, with a projected size of $15.7 trillion as early as 2030. Between transportation, commerce, and communication, AI is likely to have a large impact on human life as time goes on.

However, only a few companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon are positioned to develop these algorithms right now. This is because the entry barrier is currently very high due to data processing, diverging tasks, and computational costs.

Effect.AI proposes a private, decentralized ecosystem for AI development and AI related services called The Effect Network. This network is designed to provide an alternative to services like Amazon Mechanical Turk, Fiverr, OneSpace, and Guru.

The Effect Network will operate fully on smart contracts deployed on the NEO blockchain. The goal will be to provide most, if not all of the services necessary for a healthy and accessible artificial intelligence market.

The network requires no commissions, has a low barrier to entry, and is split up into three distinct phases: Mechanical Turk, Smart Market, and Effect Network, the details of which are described below
Team
Effect.AI has a team of 8 and is based out of the Netherlands. The biographies of key team members are listed below:

Chris Dawe, CEO – Chris graduated from the University of Toronto in 2006 with a degree in Business Management/Marketing. Before founding Effect.AI, he was a project manager for Itsavirus, based out of the Amsterdam Area.

Jesse Eisses, Blockchain Lead – Jesse has previous work experience as a developer for Isavirus and MyAdbooker and doing research for 3DUniversum. He graduated from the University of Amsterdam with bachelor’s and master’s degree in artificial intelligence. Jesse is one of the lead developers for Effect.AI, focusing on the blockchain side.

Laurens Verspeek, Development Lead – Laurens previously worked as a web developer for Isavirus, where he eventually became a lead developer. He has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Amsterdam, and a master’s in computer science from VU Amsterdam.

Nick Vogel, Design & Interaction Lead – Nick started his career as a media designer, working for Otwee B.V., MTV Networks, and others. He co-founded a custom jewelry story called Cococci in 2013, then worked as a media designer and lead designer for Itsavirus before becoming the design and interaction lead for Effect.AI.

The Effect.AI advisor list has not been released to the public yet.

          Opportunities

A lot of Human Intelligence Tasks can be performed by people without specialized skills. Therefore, even the unbanked in any countries can work on The Effect Network whereas they cannot become a worker on other centralized platforms because they don’t have a way to receive compensation.
According to the team’s projection, workers on The Effect Network can earn $9/hour on average while they can only earn $2/hour on current centralized platforms.
The project is ambitious but is a logical progression. The transition from phase 1 to 3 makes sense and each phase builds on top of the previous one. EFX tokens should have plenty of usages when only phase 1 is launched.
20% of total token supply is locked up for 18 months for the purpose of a future token sale. This is a positive sign as it shows that the team (1) has incentive to make progress and keep token price high, (2) has a long-term commitment to the project
STAGE 1
EFFECT Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives Workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it's convenient.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is based on the idea that there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, performing data de-duplication, transcribing audio recordings, or researching data details. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce (which is time consuming, expensive, and difficult to scale) or have gone undone.
Where does the name Mechanical Turk come from?
In 1769, Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen astonished Europe by building a mechanical chess-playing automaton that defeated nearly every opponent it faced. A life-sized wooden mannequin, adorned with a fur-trimmed robe and a turban, Kempelen’s “Turk” was seated behind a cabinet and toured Europe confounding such brilliant challengers as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. To persuade skeptical audiences, Kempelen would slide open the cabinet’s doors to reveal the intricate set of gears, cogs and springs that powered his invention. He convinced them that he had built a machine that made decisions using artificial intelligence. The Requesters

The provider of the HIT’s are called Requesters. These HIT’s are created by anyone who needs the power of human intelligence to perform tasks that computers are currently unable to do. These tasks are described and compiled through smart contracts on the blockchain.

The Requesters can register their tasks on the Mechanical Turk for completion by Workers. The Requesters decide how much EFX the Workers get for each completed task. In this way, the Effect Mechanical Turk gives Requesters access to an on-demand, scalable and distributed workforce.

It’s important to note that the platform will exclude or include workers from tasks based on certain criteria that were chosen by the requesters such as location, age, gender, etc.

The Workers

Workers can accept tasks from Requesters at any time, anywhere and from any device. When a Worker completes a HIT, they are paid with cryptographic EFX tokens.

The Process of submitting tasks to the Effect Mechanical Turk

Stage 2

EFFECT Smart Market
The second phase is a marketplace connecting app owners seeking an algorithm to teach their program a specific task and AI algorithms proven and built by developers.

For example say I’m an online store owner, and I would like to develop a computer program to track my customer’s behavior in my store. Then based on that I want to offer them the right products with the highest yield, I could use the future Effect Smart Market and purchase the right AI algorithm for my needs.

Following their data interchange format (and by specifying a usage fee for consumers) an application owner can register on the exchange by specifying a public endpoint for his or her application. This application can now be invoked through smart contracts on the blockchain. The caller of the contract will have to transfer the required funds to the owner of the contract to get an authorization token that allows him or her to interact with the application.

The exchange protocol can be built directly onto the Effect.AI interface where the agents receiving EFX tokens are the ones supplying AI algorithms, and the agents providing EFX tokens for these services are the Requesters. The Effect.AI Galaxy Pool performs its role in the background to assure liquidity (for more details about the Effect Galaxy Pool see below). For example, we can take an agent that has a combined system of 4 AI parts and has one AI part missing; the existing AI network can improve the availability of the missing AI part.

Phase 3-
Effect Power
The first two phases of the Network include decentralized data gathering and use of AI algorithms. Up to this point, the algorithms themselves still run on centralized servers. In the final phase of the network, the actual computation will be distributed so that the algorithms run globally without a single point of failure. To achieve this, The Effect Network uses the fact that most machine learning algorithms have a rigid structure and operate on sets of weights. These types of algorithms are relatively easy to distribute. The Effect Network decentralized compute engine is based on popular Deep Learning (DL) networks like Caffe15, MXNet16, and TensorFlow17 where the network structure can be defined as a declarative graph and weights are stored as matrices of real numbers. These matrices can be distributed over a decentralized file system and processed at different compute nodes on the network. More detail on this phase will be provided as the project progresses.
Conclusion – Pros/Cons
Pros
Fair ICO terms with a great community
Almost all of the funding of ~18 Million USD is to be raised via the public sale. Considering the over-whelming community interest, 25,000+ Telegram members to this project, the individual cap is expected to be small (~18 M USD/Number of approved whitelist subscribers). The Effect.AI token sale model (Similar to 0xProtocol token-sale model) will create a situation where there will be almost no token holders with a large proportion of the tokens. All the above should help the token price to remain stable or rise once it reaches exchanges because of the following: 1. Members that wish to buy a larger amount of EFX will only be able to do so by buying EFX once the token reaches the market. 2. In the beginning, no whale should be able to manipulate the price on the selling side by putting a large amount of EFX up for sale.

AI algorithm market- first mover
Although the Effect Smart Market (phase 2) is to be launched in Q1 2019, there currently aren’t any major platforms providing this service. Considering the ongoing penetration of AI technology into our daily life, there should be a need for a marketplace to connect AI algorithms with any entity that is seeking to utilize algorithms with learning abilities in their company. The relative first -mover advantage of the Effect Smart Market should help the project to penetrate the market and to attract a user base.
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Cons
Market Penetration
The Effect.AI first phase is the Effect Mechanical Turk, the task of attracting users to a new platform is a great challenge. Especially when you consider that the big companies like Amazon, Fiverr, and others dominate those marketplaces.

We should expect announcements of partnerships in the near future as funding is being reserved for that purpose. On the supplier’s side (Workers) – mainly third world entities like banks and governments and on the demand side (Requesters) with AI program developing companies.
How does EFFECT M-Turk work?

Tasks will include
A decentralized on-demand, scalable and distributed workforce.



Train your Algorithm
with EFFECT M-Turk
Tasks on the blockhain defined by smart contracts
As an Effect Requester, you can put tasks on the Effect Mechanical Turk platform to be completed by workers. You can decide how much cryptocurrency the workers will get for each completed task. Next, retrieve the results from the Effect Mechanical Turk platform and use these results to, for example, train their AI algorithm. Effect Mechanical Turk gives you access to an on-demand, scalable and distributed workforce