Blockchain: The Next Breakthrough in the Rapid Progress of AI

Blockchain technologies, once used exclusively for buying and selling bitcoins, have entered the mainstream of computer applications, fundamentally changing the way Internet transactions can be implemented by ascertaining trust between unknown parties. In addition, they ensure immutability (once information is entered it cannot be modified) and enable disintermediation (as trust is assured, no third party is required to verify transactions). These advantages can produce disruptive changes when properly exploited, inspiring a large number of applications. These applications are forming the backbone of what can be called the Internet of Value, bound to bring as significant changes as those brought over the last 20 years by the traditional Internet. This chapter investigates blockchain and the technologies behind it and explains their technological might and outstanding potential, not only for transactions but also as distributed databases. It also discusses its future prospects and the disruptive changes it promises to bring, while also considering the challenges that would need to be overcome for its widespread adoption. Finally, the chapter considers combining blockchain with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and discusses the revolutionary changes that would result by rapidly advancing the AI field

A Decentralized Approach Towards Responsible AI in Social Ecosystems

For AI technology to fulfill its full promises, we must design effective mechanisms into the AI systems to support responsible AI behavior and curtail potential irresponsible use, e.g. in areas of privacy protection, human autonomy, robustness, and prevention of biases and discrimination in automated decision making. In this paper, we present a framework that provides computational facilities for parties in a social ecosystem to produce the desired responsible AI behaviors. To achieve this goal, we analyze AI systems at the architecture level and propose two decentralized cryptographic mechanisms for an AI system architecture: (1) using Autonomous Identity to empower human users, and (2) automating rules and adopting conventions within social institutions. We then propose a decentralized approach and outline the key concepts and mechanisms based on Decentralized Identifier (DID) and Verifiable Credentials (VC) for a general-purpose computational infrastructure to realize these mechanisms. We argue the case that a decentralized approach is the most promising path towards Responsible AI from both the computer science and social science perspectives

Contracts Ex Machina

Smart contracts are self-executing digital transactions using decentralized cryptographic mechanisms for enforcement. They were theorized more than twenty years ago, but the recent development of Bitcoin and blockchain technologies has rekindled excitement about their potential among technologists and industry. Startup companies and major enterprises alike are now developing smart contract solutions for an array of markets, purporting to offer a digital bypass around traditional contract law. For legal scholars, smart contracts pose a significant question: Do smart contracts offer a superior solution to the problems that contract law addresses? In this article, we aim to understand both the potential and the limitations of smart contracts. We conclude that smart contracts offer novel possibilities, may significantly alter the commercial world, and will demand new legal responses. But smart contracts will not displace contract law. Understanding why not brings into focus the essential role of contract law as a remedial institution. In this way, smart contracts actually illuminate the role of contract law more than they obviate it

Blockchain Technology for Intelligent Transportation Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

The use of Blockchain technology has recently become widespread. It has emerged as an essential tool in various academic and industrial fields, such as healthcare, transportation, finance, cybersecurity, and supply chain management. It is regarded as a decentralized, trustworthy, secure, transparent, and immutable solution that innovates data sharing and management. This survey aims to provide a systematic review of Blockchain application to intelligent transportation systems in general and the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) in particular. The survey is divided into four main parts. First, the Blockchain technology including its opportunities, relative taxonomies, and applications is introduced; basic cryptography is also discussed. Next, the evolution of Blockchain is presented, starting from the primary phase of pre-Bitcoin (fundamentally characterized by classic cryptography systems), followed by the Blockchain 1.0 phase, (characterized by Bitcoin implementation and common consensus protocols), and finally, the Blockchain 2.0 phase (characterized by the implementation of smart contracts, Ethereum, and Hyperledger). We compared and identified the strengths and limitations of each of these implementations. Then, the state of the art of Blockchain-based IoV solutions (BIoV) is explored by referring to a large and trusted source database from the Scopus data bank. For a well-structured and clear discussion, the reviewed literature is classified according to the research direction and implemented IoV layer. Useful tables, statistics, and analysis are also presented. Finally, the open problems and future directions in BIoV research are summarized

Using Blockchain to Ensure Reputation Credibility in Decentralized Review Management

In recent years, there have been incidents which decreased people's trust in some organizations and authorities responsible for ratings and accreditation. For a few prominent examples, there was a security breach at Equifax (2017), misconduct was found in the Standard & Poor's Ratings Services (2015), and the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (2022) validated some of the low-performing schools as delivering higher standards than they actually were. A natural solution to these types of issues is to decentralize the relevant trust management processes using blockchain technologies. The research problems which are tackled in this thesis consider the issue of trust in reputation for assessment and review credibility at different angles, in the context of blockchain applications. We first explored the following questions. How can we trust courses in one college to provide students with the type and level of knowledge which is needed in a specific workplace? Micro-accreditation on a blockchain was our solution, including using a peer-review system to determine the rigor of a course (through a consensus). Rigor is the level of difficulty in regard to a student's expected level of knowledge. Currently, we make assumptions about the quality and rigor of what is learned, but this is prone to human bias and misunderstandings. We present a decentralized approach that tracks student records throughout the academic progress at a school and helps to match employers' requirements to students' knowledge. We do this by applying micro-accredited topics and Knowledge Units (KU) defined by NSA's Center of Academic Excellence to courses and assignments. We demonstrate that the system was successful in increasing accuracy of hires through simulated datasets, and that it is efficient, as well as scalable. Another problem is how can we trust that the peer reviews are honest and reflect an accurate rigor score? Assigning reputation to peers is a natural method to ensure correctness of these assessments. The reputation of the peers providing rigor scores needs to be taken into account for an overall rigor of a course, its topics, and its tasks. Specifically, those with a higher reputation should have more influence on the total score. Hence, we focused on how a peer's reputation is managed. We explored decentralized reputation management for the peers, choosing a decentralized marketplace as a sample application. We presented an approach to ensuring review credibility, which is a particular aspect of trust in reviews and reputation of the parties who provide them. We use a Proof-of-Stake based Algorand system as a base of our implementation, since this system is open-source, and it has a rich community support. Specifically, we directly map reputation to stake, which allows us to deploy Algorand at the blockchain layer. Reviews are analyzed by the proposed evaluation component using Natural Language Processing (NLP). In our system, NLP gauges the positivity of the written review, compares that value to a scaled numerical rating given, and determines adjustments to a peer's reputation from that result. We demonstrate that this architecture ensures credible and trustworthy assessments. It also efficiently manages the reputation of the peers, while keeping reasonable consensus times. We then turned our focus on ensuring that a peer's reputation is credible. This led us to introducing a new type of consensus called "Proof-of-Review". Our proposed implementation is again based on Algorand, since its modular architecture allows for easy modifications, such as adding extra components, but this time, we modified the engine. The proposed model then provides a trust in evaluations (review and assessment credibility) and in those who provide them (reputation credibility) using a blockchain. We introduce a blacklisting component, which prevents malicious nodes from participating in the protocol, and a minimum-reputation component, which limits the influence of under-performing users. Our results showed that the proposed blockchain system maintains liveliness and completeness. Specifically, blacklisting and the minimum-reputation requirement (when properly tuned) do not affect these properties. We note that the Proof-of-Review concept can be deployed in other types of applications with similar needs of trust in assessments and the players providing them, such as sensor arrays, autonomous car groups (caravans), marketplaces, and more

Emerging Technology in Business and Finance

In the globalized scenario where technologies are developing continuously with time, these novel methods are affecting the business and finance in the significant way. In this chapter we are going to discuss about the major emerging technologies in the field of entrepreneurship, application development, finance, and business. The authors are going to start with the introduction about the business, finance, entrepreneurship and application development, and the effect of the emerging technologies on these fields and the way in which technologies are developing from time to time, about adoption of these technologies by industries. The changes in the technologies with special reference to developed and developing country will also be the part of this chapter. Moving ahead we are discussing about these technologies in prevailing businesses as well as upcoming business. Some of the technologies we are going to discuss are Embedded Business Intelligence, Amplified Visual Presentation, Augmented Analytics, Cloud Management. Beside these technologies, we are going to cover about the growing automation in the finance sector such as Cloud banking, Robotic process automation, Blockchain, Internet of things, etc. This chapter will cover all the technologies while getting the complete knowledge about what, why, where, when and how it is changing in the present finance and business scenario. Just like the two opposite faces of the coin, one side these emerging technologies are boon for the business and finances then on the other side there are certain risks involved in these technologies, which can be a great threat to our business as well as in our routine life. So, we also discuss about the potential risks associated with these technologies. We will end our chapter by giving our conclusion, precautions, and suggestions on these technologies

A patient agent controlled customized blockchain based framework for internet of things

Although Blockchain implementations have emerged as revolutionary technologies for various industrial applications including cryptocurrencies, they have not been widely deployed to store data streaming from sensors to remote servers in architectures known as Internet of Things. New Blockchain for the Internet of Things models promise secure solutions for eHealth, smart cities, and other applications. These models pave the way for continuous monitoring of patient’s physiological signs with wearable sensors to augment traditional medical practice without recourse to storing data with a trusted authority. However, existing Blockchain algorithms cannot accommodate the huge volumes, security, and privacy requirements of health data. In this thesis, our first contribution is an End-to-End secure eHealth architecture that introduces an intelligent Patient Centric Agent. The Patient Centric Agent executing on dedicated hardware manages the storage and access of streams of sensors generated health data, into a customized Blockchain and other less secure repositories. As IoT devices cannot host Blockchain technology due to their limited memory, power, and computational resources, the Patient Centric Agent coordinates and communicates with a private customized Blockchain on behalf of the wearable devices. While the adoption of a Patient Centric Agent offers solutions for addressing continuous monitoring of patients’ health, dealing with storage, data privacy and network security issues, the architecture is vulnerable to Denial of Services(DoS) and single point of failure attacks. To address this issue, we advance a second contribution; a decentralised eHealth system in which the Patient Centric Agent is replicated at three levels: Sensing Layer, NEAR Processing Layer and FAR Processing Layer. The functionalities of the Patient Centric Agent are customized to manage the tasks of the three levels. Simulations confirm protection of the architecture against DoS attacks. Few patients require all their health data to be stored in Blockchain repositories but instead need to select an appropriate storage medium for each chunk of data by matching their personal needs and preferences with features of candidate storage mediums. Motivated by this context, we advance third contribution; a recommendation model for health data storage that can accommodate patient preferences and make storage decisions rapidly, in real-time, even with streamed data. The mapping between health data features and characteristics of each repository is learned using machine learning. The Blockchain’s capacity to make transactions and store records without central oversight enables its application for IoT networks outside health such as underwater IoT networks where the unattended nature of the nodes threatens their security and privacy. However, underwater IoT differs from ground IoT as acoustics signals are the communication media leading to high propagation delays, high error rates exacerbated by turbulent water currents. Our fourth contribution is a customized Blockchain leveraged framework with the model of Patient-Centric Agent renamed as Smart Agent for securely monitoring underwater IoT. Finally, the smart Agent has been investigated in developing an IoT smart home or cities monitoring framework. The key algorithms underpinning to each contribution have been implemented and analysed using simulators.Doctor of Philosoph

AI and blockchain adoption in corporate governance

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonPurpose The purpose of this doctoral thesis sets out to explore and elaborate on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain adoption in corporate governance from ethical perspectives. Positioned within the corporate governance domain, this study adopts an explicit business perspective to study corporate governance change with emerging AI and blockchain technological tools in general and focuses on the ethical use of technologies specifically. As such, this empirical investigation aims to help organizations understand the ethical benefits and ethical dilemmas of using AI and blockchain in businesses and draw plans on how to govern these technologies ethically for the benefit of the business and society. Design/Methodology/Approach: This study adopts specific techniques and a pragmatic, step-by-step netnography approach to investigate online traces from social media sites and extends these online explorations with online semi-structured interviews. The research design of this investigation follows step-by-step procedures that are methodologically sound to ensure rigor in this investigation to enhance the trustworthiness of this study. In total, this research collects an abundance of data: 34 LinkedIn Posts with Comments; 12 Webinars; 22 YouTube Videos; 19 Videos; 10 Podcasts, and 17 semi-structured interview videos. The video, audio, and interview data have been transcribed into textual data total of 453065 words for thematic analysis using NVivo software. Enough time has been allocated to the iterative process of data collection and data analysis. The analysis moves back and forth to the point when theoretical saturation is achieved. The data structure extracts from data in this study illustrate the analytic claims that match the analysis and data together, to ensure a good fit between described method and reported analysis are consistent. Findings: This study develops a thematic framework that constitutes the corporate governance transformation with the ethical use of AI and blockchain technology. This framework provides a holistic understanding of why corporate governance needs to change, especially with the emergence of blockchain and AI technologies, what changes will corporate governance encounter, and how corporate governance can imperatively respond to the ethical use of these technologies. Specifically, it explicitly provides comprehensive understanding of the ethical benefits and ethical concerns of using AI and blockchain technologies in corporate governance, and reveals how companies can govern the use of these technologies ethically. In general terms, the findings of this study support the notion of corporate governance change to transform business models and processes to leverage the new capabilities of AI and blockchain technologies, to priories creativity, speed, and accountability, to replace the old business model, to foster agile or collaborative governance to deal with uncertainty, agility, adaptiveness, and cooperation in the digital world, to foster a network and platform strategies to drive success. This study goes beyond the extant corporate governance scholarship to assess the technological impact to capture values for companies in ethical ways to sustain future growth. Additionally, the notion of corporate governance is further specified and significantly expanded by this study to assess the adoption of AI and blockchain as new corporate governance tools or mechanisms, to enhance ethical benefits when used properly, and mitigate ethical dilemmas with proper checks and balances, safeguards in place, to help organizations stay relevant in this digital transformation and be ethical and sustainable. This study empirically corroborates that in theory, the use of blockchain and AI can enhance ethical practice by detecting fraud and anomaly activities, due to the unique capabilities of blockchain and AI technologies. Further, this research adds depth and specificity by identifying the ethical concerns of using blockchain and AI in corporate governance. The study empirically reveals the ethical concerns of privacy issues, unethical use of data, job transformation and replacement, and algorithm bias that companies will encounter when they use these technologies. In addition, the findings of this study suggest how companies can ethically govern the use of these technologies in socially responsible ways as they transform digitally. Originality/Value: The emergent thematic framework is constructed from the empirical and analytical procedures specifically and purposely designed for this study. This study makes theoretical contributions to knowledge and enriches the extant works of literature, and also provides practical contributions to the ethical use of disruptive technologies, future workforce, and regulations. However, the study was conducted within certain theoretical, methodological, empirical, and pragmatic conditions, which might constitute particular limitations and constraints. Therefore, the last section of this thesis elucidates and suggests the directions for future research

The Applications of Blockchain To Cybersecurity

A blockchain is a decentralized public ledger facilitating secure transactions between untrusted network nodes. It has garnered significant recognition for its pivotal role in cryptocurrency systems, where it ensures secure and decentralized transaction records. Over the past decade, blockchain has attracted considerable attention from various industries, as it holds the potential to revolutionize multiple sectors, including cybersecurity. However, this field of study is relatively new, and numerous questions remain unanswered regarding the effectiveness of blockchain in cybersecurity. This research adopted a qualitative research design to investigate the current implementations of blockchain-based security and their applicability in the current cybersecurity context. Additionally, this work explored the mechanisms employed by blockchain to uphold the security triad. Findings indicate that blockchain exhibits substantial potential in addressing existing challenges in cybersecurity, particularly those related to the Internet of Things, data integrity and ownership, and network security. Nonetheless, widespread adoption faces limitations due to technological immaturity, high-cost complexity, and regulatory hurdles. Therefore, utilizing blockchain-based solutions in cybersecurity necessitates a thorough analysis of their applicability to an organization\u27s specific needs, a clear definition of implementation goals, and careful navigation of challenges