A half-day workshop on Monday (Afternoon), 17 June 2019
Blockchain is a foundational technology that is revolutionizing the way transactions are conceived, executed, managed, and monetized. While the commercial benefits of blockchain infrastructure are imminent, the underlying technological problems need significant attention from researchers. Of specific interest to researchers and application developers in computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) is the tremendous opportunity to make a connection to these emerging infrastructure capabilities and realize how their skills can be leveraged to make an impact by marrying computer vision/AI and blockchain technologies. This marriage can happen in two ways. Firstly, AI technologies can be exploited to address critical gaps in blockchain platforms such as scaling, modeling, and privacy analysis. Secondly, as the world moves towards increasing decentralization of AI and emergence of AI marketplaces, a blockchain-based infrastructure would be essential to create the necessary trust between diverse stakeholders.
Many complex practical challenges such as stakeholder identity management, compliance with regulations (e.g., provenance of data, compliance of AI systems with local laws), integrity of data, and protecting privacy of the sensitive information can be effectively addressed using blockchain technology. As cameras become ubiquitous (over 4 billion mobile phones, millions of public surveillance cameras, and increasing presence of egocentric bodycams in professional environments) and compute power is becoming pervasively available, it is increasingly clear that the business world is going to consider camera as the default sensor and camera-based analytics as the de facto information channel to improve the integrity of transactions from various diverse perspectives.
Although many security, bias, fairness, trust related computer vision and AI topics have been discussed in the past, there has been no attempt to comprehensively bring together the two most exciting technologies of our time – Computer Vision/AI & Blockchain – to leverage their complementary features, both from scientific and industrial communities. We solicit original research papers covering these areas to be submitted to the workshop.