Blockchain, AI Project Aiur Hopes To Boost Science Research Breakthroughs - BlockTribune

"Iris.ai, the artificial intelligence tool which helps researchers find relevant scientific papers, has started a new venture. Project Aiur,is envisioned as an open, community-governed engine that will allow users to access and contribute to a validated repository of scientific research. The aim of Aiur is to democratize access to and extend the reach of scientific knowledge worldwide by disintermediating the industry. Participants in Project Aiur will collaborate to build a blockchain “Knowledge Validation Engine” (KVE) which will allow users to submit research and have it verified against all other research in the world. Aiur aims to be part of bringing radical change to a highly lucrative, oligopolistic scientific publishing industry that has led to a dysfunctional incentive model. There are a number of problems affecting the scientific community today which are hampering global progress. While there is an abundance of research being conducted and published, it is costly to access and difficult to manage. Research professionals are pressured to deliver, publish, and review on tight deadlines, creating perverse incentives to exaggerate facts and omit assumptions and constraints. With little to no accountability and reward for authors and reviewers, reproducibility suffers. Project Aiur will join researchers, coders, and anyone interested in science into a community-governed ecosystem that works to address the numerous problems damaging the scientific research community. Participants will collaborate to build a “Knowledge Validation Engine” (KVE) based on artificial intelligence and machine learning technology. The engine, when ready, will allow users to submit a piece of research and have it verified against all other research in the world. Over time, the engine will host a vast collection of research that has been validated. Anita Schjøll Brede, CEO and co-founder of Iris.ai said: “We envision a world where the right scientific knowledge is available at our fingertips, where all research is validated and reproducible, where unbiased scientific information flows freely, and where research already paid for with our tax money is free to us. With Project Aiur, we aim to give ownership of science back to scientists, universities, and the public. Validation of science is something that has to be an open process – no one company can be an arbiter. With Aiur, we’re setting up a self-sufficient, decentralised ecosystem that will disintermediate the process of validating scientific papers. Everyone who participates in Project Aiur will own the project, can use the tools we build together, and can vote in important decisions.” Project Aiur is enabled by blockchain and utilizes the AIUR token. This functional token grants membership, voting rights, and access to the KVE and other tools developed on top of the community’s software. Anyone who contributes to the community through code, training data, and research earns AIUR tokens. The tokens can from the beginning be utilized for Iris.ai’s premium services. Co-founders Anita Schjøll Brede and Victor Botev talked with Block Tribune about the project.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: Walk me through how this works for a researcher and a contributor.

ANITA SCHJØLL BREDE: So there’s a number of different ways you can be a contributor. There is from the start of the project as soon as the code and everything is launched; you can contribute by being AI trainer or by part of the team actually coding the platform. And of course that is an AI trainer takes a piece of research literature so a research paper and trains that by annotating the data. Selecting key words from the text. Selecting other contextual synonyms et cetera. And building up this data set. And that is how you can earn tokens in the beginning. The same goes for helping to code the knowledge, validation engine as well. Longer term as that part and as the knowledge validation engine is build out; then a researcher can choose to take their research paper that either is ready to be published or that they want to just validate as part of their writing process and give that to the knowledge validation engine to read and have that validated up against all the other research...."