Two five-hour Zoom webinars on back-to-back days. Woo! I’m glad that’s over. But seriously, check out the recorded sessions and talks. I loved everything. Good places to start are Jim Kurose’s keynote (session 8) and the panel discussion on regulating artificial intelligence. I’m in awe of and grateful to all of the brilliant and hard-working … More UMass Amherst Symposium on Computing for the Common Good
A few months ago, The Kuwa Foundation partnered with the University of Massachusetts Center for Data Science to develop The Crypto UBI Project (TCUP). I’m excited to say that we just published the TCUP source code on GitHub under an MIT open source license. We also deployed a demo on our development server. TCUP distributes a cryptocurrency basic income payment to people who have Kuwa IDs, which are “smart contracts” that live on an Ethereum blockchain. We’ve taken the first step in a long and challenging, but ultimately worthwhile journey. … More Please Steal This Code – The Crypto UBI Project is on GitHub
The UMass Center for Data Sciences and The Kuwa Foundation co-sponsored a project to implement a working version of the Kuwa identity platform. My friends at the center will present the project to an important group this week. They asked me to summarize the project for the three-minute presentation. Here it is. … More The Kuwa Project Distilled
We’ve formed The Kuwa Foundation, a nonprofit corporation. The foundation has partnered with the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences to make our vision of an open, decentralized, minimally intrusive and self-sovereign identity platform a reality (or at least a real working prototype). So we’ve hired five UMass Computer Science graduate students for the summer. We’re going to get something working. … More Introducing The Kuwa Foundation: Identity for Humanity
Like cookies and milk, cryptocurrencies and Universal Basic Income (UBI) are two particularly promising concepts that could go great together. If we’re to give money to the needy, then we should use the best technology available. Because trust is built-in, cryptocurrencies can bypass the sticky bureaucratic fingers that are all too common in many countries. The most significant barrier to large-scale implementation of a crypto UBI is the lack of a reliable identification system. Needy people don’t typically have passports. And since their governments are often corrupt, giving those governments power to exclude or include people would be dangerous. My Kuwa (“to be” in Swahili) white paper is a first attempt to describe a potential technical solution to this identification challenge. … More Kuwa: A Decentralized, Pseudo-anonymous and Sybil-Resistant Individual Identification System
“The Master Algorithm” gives readers an overview of the current state of machine learning, The book’s hypothesis is that there can be one general purpose algorithm that’s able to learn anything. The book reviews the philosophies, strengths, and weaknesses of each of the “five tribes” of machine learning, and in the process, readers learn the history of artificial intelligence (AI). The Master Algorithm concludes with some thoughts about a future when computers surpass the capabilities of the human brain for tasks that previously required conscious beings. Will learners solve all of our problems and bring about technological singularity, or will our future learning machines become our overlords in a Skynet-like dystopia? … More Utopia, Dystopia, or Both? The Master Algorithm is Coming.
Technophile Musings 