Research Summary - Convergence of Blockchain, IoT, and AI

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#5

It’s great to point to convergence AI, IoT, Blockchain. Blockchain is like a bridge to connect IoT and AI. I also believe in the future is coming soon. I think all the technical solutions are provided already to companies. As the summary mention that

I read through one of the board of governors of the federal reserve system thinks about stablecoins from this paper Taming Wildcat Stablecoins. This paper point out three commnets:
First, the use of private bank notes was a failure because they did not satisfy the no-questions-asked (NQA) principle.
Second, the U.S. government took control of the monetary system under the National Bank Act and subsequent legislation in order to eliminate the private bank note system in favor of a uniform currency—namely, national bank notes.
Third, runs on demand deposits only ended with deposit insurance in 1934.

I think the most difficult part is how to convince the rule makers.

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#6

The author is convinced with the idea of the Convergence of Blockchain, IoT, and AI, and his lamp analogy is interesting and visionary. The definition of IoT is a system of interrelated computing devices or machines that are provided with unique identifiers (UIDs) equipped with the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. According to the Internet, there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being created every day, it is expected that the volume of data is going to double every two years. Additionally, we are entering the area of AIOT, therefore; the estimation of the data generated every other year will be one time more might be underestimated. Trained with such a huge amount of data, artificial intelligence will undoubtedly thrive, but it’s impossible to store the volume of data on this scale with traditional method; left alone each device should be equipped with the ability to communicate with each other and make the appropriate decision in time, which is the essence of AIOT. This is when blockchain comes into play, not only because of the scalability it provides, but also most importantly its immutability feature.

Just imagine years after now, you’re sitting in an autonomous car, each car can acquire data via ways of means lidar, traffic data, communication with others vehicles, etc., and then make the best decision to arrive at the destination in the shortest time. The communications between agents become essential, however, it also becomes a vulnerability of the framework. If someone sends the target car some fake traffic data making the vehicle takes a detour, therefore they can hijack it. This scenario points out blockchain is an inevitable part of the development of AIOT.

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#7

The IoT lamp case was actually just an example to show that truly any arbitrary IoT device may leverage the proposed AIoT framework in a beneficial way.
I personally feel that the authors could have provided more use cases. The one you describe in this article, PANTHER, is great - in which wildfires are detected by an artificial nervous system, of sorts, where an assortment of sensors - heat, humidity, wind, fuel, and cameras - are connected in a node that connects to the cloud, the data of which can subsequently be used by machine learning tools.

Our team of Deane @Albert @fmendoz7 @TurtleHead @eleventh and @Cindy are now in the beginning stages of our AIoT Blockchain research project. I plan to work on the research summaries “Multi-Layer Aggregate Verification for IoT Blockchain” and “Efficient Attribute-Based Smart Contract Access Control Enhanced by Reputation Assessment” with Cindy. Albert is working on the summary for “SoK: Applying Blockchain Technology in Industrial Internet of Things”. Francis is tackling the summary “An analysis and evaluation of lightweight hash functions for blockchain-based IoT devices”.

Teamwork makes the dream work!

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#8

The technical questions of crypto that have come about and that are bound to come in the future will always eventually have a solution. But answering this-

-remains the key in the future of crypto!

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#9

What are some immediate business use cases for the convergence of IoT, blockchain and AI? @Albert @fmendoz7 @TurtleHead @eleventh and @Cindy – would this be a military technology primarily? I can imagine swarming drone detection lines or smart mines. What other things come to mind?

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#10

There are already some examples that startup companies are applying AIoT and blockchain technology to the agriculture industry. With the IoT sensors, producers can gather data on a range of metrics and send back information for decision-making. Using the data, artificial intelligence (AI) can improve the growing and selling processes with the parameters put in their model, help farmers determine which crops to grow to maximize the profit or anticipate potential threats by cross-fitting with historical information. Then, the producer can use robots to get rid of the weak plants to create more space for the healthy plants and deploy drone spreading capsules with the eggs of natural enemies targeting certain types of pests before they cause damage. Meanwhile, the data will be uploaded to the blockchain, creating secure, transparent records, which is valuable for the agriculture industry to create smart contracts tracking the food from its origins to grocery stores. The data can also be uploaded to the blockchain via oracle to create an insurance smart contract. Farmers can purchase agricultural derivatives. If the condition goes south, the derivative will compensate for the losses.

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#11

Although the trend is just starting, it’s guaranteed that it will gain popularity in the recent future.

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#12

One good application scenario might be with surveillance systems that use cameras or motion detectors in an IoT network. All data is uploaded and stored (at least for a specified amount of time) to a database (off-chain storage). Suspicious activity would be detected by AI and flagged data could be uploaded as on-chain storage for both immutability and a longer-term (perpetual) storage. Essentially in this case we have AI to select which data goes onto the blockchain.

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#13

Smart contracts are what governs autonomous processes in an AIoT blockchain system. The authors describe a pay-per-use scenario in which, based on the terms of the smart contract, lamp(s) in the network turn on for a specified time after receiving a micro-payment. Moreover, the lamp’s system status data such as power or time of usage may be uploaded to the blockchain and AI could use the uploaded data to optimize business processes (periodic maintenance, minimization of downtime, et cetera).

I personally think that a better example than the authors gave would be in the process of renting a car. In the same way, each car would then have its own wallet and micropayments would allow for it to be driven for a specified amount of time. Due to a constant stream of data uploaded to the blockchain, if the driver speeds or if for example one of the parts malfunctions, the timestamp of when this event occured could be used to prove misuse or misconduct.

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#14

That’s a great point on tokenization and shared ownership. More and more infrastructure in an AIoT blockchain network could be publically owned, rented out for daily use, and auto-monitored/regulated.
In terms of AI increasing blockchain scalability, the authors cite a case from another paper titled “Performance optimization for blockchain-enabled industrial internet of things (IIoT) systems: a deep reinforcement learning approach”. In this paper, a DRL-based system allows for higher level of throughput by using dynamic selection of certain blockchain parameters (block producers, block size, consensus algorithm, and block interval).

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#15

This is another great example. Decisions made by AIoT devices do need to be explainable, especially when there are such immense safety concerns as in the case of autonomous vehicles. We can have blockchain to prove specific data existed and to justify the AI’s course of action. This could then be accessed by law enforcement entities or car insurance companies, for example.

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Post Idea: Multi-Layer Aggregate Verification for IoT Blockchain
Post Idea: Leveraging Blockchain for Greater Accessibility of Machine Learning Models
#16

I really enjoyed this summary, I think this convergence is going to have huge implications on the future of industry. The fact that it will behoove a business to have every aspect be connected via IoT from the whole supply chain to the coffee maker in the break room and be logged, evaluated, and optimized.

I like to think the more and more sensors added are only going to give further insights and novel discoveries of how to benefit from the system whether it be large or small. For example, on a global scale, the more data we have about the climate will crack open new models that will help to predict what might happen better than something we might have never been able to predict ourselves/without AIoT.

These researchers are looking into Wave-induced Atmospheric Variability and have only recently been able to get some interesting results due to the availability of more sensors/data.

Systems using blockchain data will be able to make leaps and bounds as they can communicate effectively and efficiently interesting correlations due to the standardized datasets.

It is only a matter of time before blockchain AIoT is going to take over as they are perfect for each other.

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SCRF Contributor Recognition and Rewards Initiative
#17

Hey @willcon, thanks for the comment. I just checked out the WAVE project. Climate prediction is just another great example of what AIoT is capable of. It just so happens that these three innovations - AI, IoT, and blockchain - are set to change everything. The converged fields of AIoT and IoT Blockchain have already become major fields of research. In the same way, the converged fields of AI Blockchain and AIoT Blockchain are likely to become major topics of future research.

Incidentally on some news, just today Facebook released its first set of smart glasses (Ray-Ban Stories), another great example of AIoT technology. I’ve pre-ordered Dr. Kai-Fu Lee’s book “AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future” which holds some astounding predictions for the future. One interesting one is that AR and VR technologies will allow for virtual and physical meetings to become practically indistinguishable from each other.

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#18

This has been a great thread to read - a lot of research has focused on more incremental improvements and points regarding to mechanism or design, but real world use cases are not isolated, research that focuses on connecting the dots and utilizing all elements of emerging tech such as the articles cited in this thread will be the applications we’ll see.

A couple points that may be of interest to this thread

  • Helium, a telecom based project may be a good example of connecting IoT with blockchain. Traditionally IoT networks have been difficult to develop because of the startup and incentive costs to maintain a network, Helium has used blockchain economics and incentive structures to help with this (miners and validators process and host their local network for IoT device in exchange for token rewards)

  • Other shifts to think about that all are developing in parallel - the 5G rollout will enable far higher throughput of information transfer / compute and lower latency and the transition onto the Cloud for most applications will complement AI / IoT use cases (and many would argue is the infrastructure needed to enable the next generation of industrial or city-wide AI/IoT)

  • Although the use cases of blockchain are exciting, one small critique in the paper would be that the researchers don’t exact answer the question of why a blockchain (as opposed to just a normal database) would be the best solution to some of these problems. We’re seeing for example the development of private LTE networks for smart cities or for utilities to monitor their service deliver with IoT, with blockchain potentially being a slower and more expensive solution due to consensus needs and node hosting. One would argue with the need for security that instead of a public blockchain a permissioned blockchain would be utilized, but at that point the line blurs between what one may define a blockchain to be

An interesting paper regarding 5G and Blockchain is this one here for anyone interested in a read:

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SCRF Contributor Recognition and Rewards Initiative
#19

Great summary. The topic brought by this paper is interesting yet somewhat vague. Despite all the difficulties yet to be overcome, there are still a lot of research potentials with systems that already exist. Introducing (new) IoT devices combining existing Blockchain and AI systems could be a great commercial achievement; Pulishing a recommandation map for different IoT devices to different Blockchain protocols using different AI applications in between along with all the tradeoff discussed could be a great academic achievement. It’s good to know inspiring paper like this one.

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#20

Very nice summary.

Hence reading through the comments ebbs and flows, I can’t help but to ask whether “standardizing” incumbent IoT data and providing “authenticity” would be the appropriate approach to automate data collection and preprocessing for AI applications. Forcefully making end users or consumers abide by a specific blockchains Smart contract might as well de-incentivize adoption of blockchain technology on the IoT layer of data collection.

In my opinion, blockchain can provide data authenticity and basic preprocessing via the Smart contract and that would be a huge advantage for streamlining the end to end of an AI applications development. Along side with block chain providing a more secure decentralized but also centralized data infrastructure, at the end of the day, providers of such blockchain infrastructure are still there to make money. Denying a means to obtain data and enforcing a more complex interfacing by the end user would be the life and death of said budding blockchain maintainers.

Then there is the issue of what it truly means to be “on chain”. With such large volumes of inflow, inevitably, there needs to be a form of a single source of truth. To my knowledge, a purely on chain approach to that “single source of truth” is yet to be available. I know of several Graph based technologies that may facilitate such “single source of truths” but even then, there are still drawbacks and compromises.

I also do concur that there needs to be further improvement on the existing network layer architectures. Lightning network for bitcoin, cardano being quite dismissive on doing anything more than networking on chain, and IOTA tangle being an aspiring resolution to the “on chain” data scalability issue.

I have this presentation for a past partnership proposal I tried to pitch to a blockchain company on the integration of Data science and Blockchain for aspiring Paas companies.

Please do tell me your thoughts about it.

-Tony

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SCRF Contributor Recognition and Rewards Initiative
#21

Hey Yen, thanks for the comment and welcome to SCRF! That’s another great convergence idea that you bring up: using AI to recommend different blockchains for different IoT devices.
In terms of theoretical vs. applied research, this paper is much more on the applied research end of the spectrum. It is true that this paper is highly concept-based and takes on more the form of an idea generator than of a finalized implementation. Nonetheless, even the most sophisticated of technologies start off as just an idea.

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#22

Great and easy to read summary!

The convergence of Blockchain, AI and IoT technologies to create systems and applications may be inevitable and will, if/when it happens, turn out to be quite beneficial to most people. When combined, these technologies can boost new business models and disrupt the markets as we have them now.

Artificial Intelligence is able to analyse massive data to extract insightful trends and information from those data. Blockchain will also solve most of the security issues that arise from IoT and AI. Blockchain could also provide better privacy protection and promote ease of payment.

However, to be realistic, managing these technologies singly involves high costs and risks, nonetheless when they are combined. Also, there isn’t enough energy to power systems that will arise from the combination of these technologies. Currently, gas prices are rising exponentially and may continue to rise if there is no deterrent, which in turn, means Blockchain may prove to be far more expensive and difficult to afford. There is also the issue of Bandwidth, with the combination of these technologies, we will need faster and more efficient internet. 5G, I believe, is only the beginning of the sort of Telecoms tech that will be needed. Perhaps, as stated in the key takeaway, by the time these combined technologies are ready for use, these challenges would have been largely surmounted.

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#23

I found one of the comments in this paper very insightful: AI is an automation tool for decision making and it can optimize the way we store data as well as decide on which data we want to store. This characteristic of AI can benefit IoT in controlling facilities in a system. The data that is produced by IoT needs a large and secure medium for storage. This is where blockchain comes in.

Recently I read an article on risks of applying blockchain in IoT (I linked it down below). I extracted and summarized some of the most interesting and important aspects of this source.

Challenges and risks of using blockchain in IoT:

  1. Scalability

Blockchain makes use of decentralized networks in its operation. However, as the size of the ledger increases, the network might become centralized instead. A record management system is required to keep the centralized network in check.

  1. Processing power and time

An IoT system consists of many devices with different levels of processing power. Not all devices can run the same encryption algorithms. In addition, some parts of the IoT system might experience lag.

  1. Storage

Due to the decentralized network in blockchain, the ledger record should be stored on the nodes. The amount of storage needed increases over time, and might even surpass the capabilities of the facilities in an IoT system.

  1. Vendor

As blockchain is a novel technology in this era, human resources with strong technical background and skills are still scarce. To overcome this issue, many organizations and enterprises should hire specialized vendors to set up blockchain solutions. However, it is often hard to find vendors with high credibility.

  1. Security

Despite blockchain’s high security, it is still prone to malicious activity from other parties. This can happen especially on a public blockchain, where many users have a private key to “sign” on transactions as most systems lack multi-factor authentication. In addition, losing the account’s private key means losing the account’s data as well.

  1. Legal issues

The laws governing blockchain and its usage differ among countries. Many businesses prefer to avoid blockchain altogether due to the risks of legal issues.

All in all, there are many elements to consider when applying blockchain in IoT, and I think that among the four convergence cases you give (AIoT, IoT Blockchain, Blockchain AI, and AIoT Blockchain), IoT Blockchain and AIoT are much more studied, yet there are still many unknowns ahead even for these convergence cases.

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#24

The Pay as You Go Business Model

This is article is a great exploration of what’s possible, and I absolutely welcome such explorations. At the same time, I’m reminded of a movie line in which a character lamented the move from science to business without differentiating strongly between coulds and shoulds.

The practical consequences of some of the scenarios proposed are interesting. For example, the pay-per use model has been long discussed among practitioners in the IoT space. However, the day-to-day consequences of living in a world in which your devices may cease to function due to not putting enough quarters in the machine have prevented that model from taking shape, at least in the B2C space.

If a consumer has a smart lock that only functions when the lock bill has been paid, the consumer could find herself locked outside or inside of her home. The authors also provide a B2G case of a privatized street lamp, a common public good. Hooking a safety device up to only function when it’s been paid presents a special kind of public danger. Even in a B2B case, tokenization of multiple collaborating devices could lead to stalled work not because of anything wrong with the device itself but perhaps some particular issue with the blockchain of that specific device, adding an additional layer of complexity–one the owner or some technician may be incapable of addressing.

The case for AI assisting the management of IoT is easy. The case for blockchain is also exciting, but in order for the vision laid out in this article to come to fruition, it may take a clearly communicated value proposition that convinces users that individual bills for every device they have are a benefit rather than a complex tapestry of bills to stress over. If an edge device has the potential to quit on a user (camper, explorer, hunter, etc.) in a far off area because of triggered condition in a smart contract, even though the device is otherwise well-formed and functioning, this could be viewed as a tremendous reduction in value. So, while the data utility and business value is clear, I’m curious if anyone has come across studies on how these implied and proposed blockchain enabled pay-per use business models are structured, perhaps with some hints as to their practicality or viability.
ianMalcolm

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