According to EpiK official news, leading artificial intelligence scientist Ben Goertzel recently joined EpiK as an expert advisor. The two parties will carry out in-depth cooperation regarding the construction of big data networks for AI systems across all application areas, with a particular focus on the medical and finance domains, to jointly promote the development of decentralized AI and the new data economy. Along with his science and technology guidance, Goertzel will help EpiK grow in the United States and European data markets.
A veteran of more than 30 years in the AI field, Goertzel is globally recognized as a leading AI thinker, engineer and entrepreneur, as well as a pioneer of the intersection between AI and blockchain. He is the founder and CEO of SingularityNET, as well as chairman of the OpenCog Foundation, the Artificial General Intelligence Society, and Humanity+ (the World Transhumanist Association).
Father of Sophia, the world’s first robot citizen
Sophia, the world’s first robot citizen, made her first public appearance at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas in March 2016 and immediately attracted the attention of the world. She has been reported by the global media and participated in many high-profile interviews. In October 2017, Sophia “became” a citizen of Saudi Arabia, becoming the first robot to obtain citizenship in any country. In November 2017, Sophia was named the first innovation champion in history by the United Nations Development Programme and was the first non-human to receive any title of the United Nations. From 2014 to 2018, Goertzel served as chief scientist and head of software at Hanson Robotics, leading the team that created the software behind the robot, Sophia.
While Sophia has been dramatically impactful, Goertzel has been public about his desire to progress such systems much further. Regarding his masterpiece, he also publicly admitted:
“Some people think Sophia has the same intelligence as human beings, which is too ideal. But Sophia does convey a beautiful vision to the audience, that is, to show the public a beautiful and smiling robot face, which can really make the public intuitively feel that artificial general intelligence is feasible and will be realized around them soon.”
Since 2018, as CEO of SingularityNET, he has been closely collaborating with Hanson Robotics on multiple projects including an eldercare robot, Grace, created by the SingularityNet–Hanson joint venture Awakening Health. Grace’s software system is completely different from Sophia’s, and fully leverages the SingularityNET platform and the OpenCog artificial general intelligence framework which includes an extensive knowledge graph, along with an assemblage of deep neural networks. Grace will work as an assistant in the medical health field to take care of patients in high-end medical departments — a critical function in the current pandemic-transformed economy.
In the medical field and beyond, Goertzel’s goal with SingularityNET has been to combine artificial intelligence and blockchain to democratize access to artificial intelligence so it can provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people. By combining open-source principles, blockchain technology and machine learning, SingularityNET enables everyone to share AI technology globally. He said:
“Siloing of AI technology within proprietary company codebases and networks has both held back progress toward artificial general intelligence, and slowed down the flow of the benefits of AI to the whole of humanity. This is why SingularityNET has developed a decentralized AI network through which multiple AI agents created by multiple parties can be pooled to achieve the purpose of sharing code and selling applications, and achieving greater levels of intelligence.”
The deep bindings between Ben and EpiK
EpiK will work with SingularityNET to build a more powerful and richer medical knowledge graph platform. Combined with EpiK’s platform construction technology, such as the “health chain” project completed in cooperation with Tsinghua University, and the complete AI knowledge graph system with singularityNET, this will empower artificial general intelligence and create a more powerful assistant, Grace.
About EpiK Protocol
EpiK Protocol is committed to the construction of a decentralized super-large-scale knowledge map. Through decentralized storage technology (IPFS), decentralized autonomous organizations and token economy models, it organizes and inspires members of the global community to organize human knowledge in various fields into a knowledge graph. By jointly building, sharing and continuously updating this eternal knowledge base of human beings, this will expand the vision of artificial intelligence to a more intelligent future.