With the rising emergence of decentralized and opportunistic approaches to
machine learning, end devices are increasingly tasked with training deep
learning models on-devices using crowd-sourced data that they collect
themselves. These approaches are desirable from a resource consumption
perspective and also from a privacy preservation perspective. When the devices
benefit directly from the trained models, the incentives are implicit -
contributing devices' resources are incentivized by the availability of the
higher-accuracy model that results from collaboration. However, explicit
incentive mechanisms must be provided when end-user devices are asked to
contribute their resources (e.g., computation, communication, and data) to a
task performed primarily for the benefit of others, e.g., training a model for
a task that a neighbor device needs but the device owner is uninterested in. In
this project, we propose a novel blockchain-based incentive mechanism for
completely decentralized and opportunistic learning architectures. We leverage
a smart contract not only for providing explicit incentives to end devices to
participate in decentralized learning but also to create a fully decentralized
mechanism to inspect and reflect on the behavior of the learning architecture