The COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest challenge our global society has faced in the 21st century. The rapid and unforeseen spread of the virus coupled with a devastating economic shutdown offer unprecedented challenges to governments, businesses and citizens across the globe. Now more than ever, collective action is needed to combat these challenges. Fortunately, technology and the interconnected nature of our globalized society allow us to come together to create innovative solutions to these most pressing of problems, without compromising the pivotal need for social distancing.
NEM, as an ecosystem of contributors distributed across the globe, cannot idly stand by during this global health emergency. For that reason, we are proud to announce our support for the COVIDathon project being launched by our partner organization the Decentralized Artificial Intelligence Alliance (DAIA), an organization of 50+ companies, labs and nonprofits, which aims to address some of the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVIDathon is the world’s first decentralized AI hackathon with a mission to develop and launch open-source code and tools, by experts in the medical, AI, and blockchain sectors. By working together to develop such tools, we hope to reduce the risk of current and future infectious outbreaks, and cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. The hackathon will bring together developers, doctors and engineers to work together on four different tracks: Data Privacy, Epidemiology & Medicine, Informational & Coping Tools, and Open Innovation; developing solutions to leverage AI and blockchain technology to maximise social impact.
COVIDathon is open to all participants and projects who wish to contribute to such a worthy initiative. The hackathon kicks off on April 1st, running for eight weeks across its four distinct tracks. The founding members of the initiative, SingularityNET and Ocean Protocol, will provide tech assistance, technology and 1-on-1 mentorship to participants over the course of the hackathon.
An expert panel of judges will be assembled, including AI, blockchain and medical experts, to assess the contributions for each track.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the lives of millions across the globe. While many governments have been proactive in their approach to combating the crisis, the localized and distributed nature of these responses mean that the global response has been slowed and hampered by lack of effective decentralized methods for coordination and information dissemination. By using the latest cutting-edge decentralized technology to provide more effective ways of tracking and controlling the spread of disease, it is hoped that together we can better address these issues.
Our goal in taking part in this collaborative initiative is to do our part to address current shortcomings, and build solutions that can make a difference.
For more information, visit https://daia.foundation/covidathon/ or join the telegram community: https://t.me/covidathon.