Last week the Artificial Intelligence (AI) service provider SingularityNET announced its partnership with Ping An, one of China’s largest five insurers.
A public blockchain underlies SingularityNET’s strategy as a decentralized AI and machine learning network. The collaboration with Ping An aims to develop technology for commercial and enterprise customers.
SingularityNET’s VP of Marketing, Arif Khan, comments that “at the beginning of the collaboration, SingularityNET and Ping An will focus on three main areas: Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Computer Vision (CV) and model training, where SingularityNET’s ecosystem could be applied for commercial purposes.”
Only last month, the company released the beta of its blockchain based AI marketplace on Ethereum.
Ping An, one of the world’s biggest financial conglomerates, already uses AI to provide unstaffed medical care using booths that look similar to those for self-service photos. That’s apart from the AI used in its financial technology.
They plan to develop recognition technology with Ping An’s sprawling client base and SingularityNET’s blockchain platform. OCR applies machine learning to teach computers to recognize text, while CV and model training aims to use tech to gather information from images and video. This includes motion tracking and automated analysis of images, such as medical scans.
China’s 2017 ban on ICOs, the same year as SingularityNET’s successful offering, has not put off Ping An from public blockchain solutions. However, its initiatives to date have involved private permissioned blockchains based on Hyperledger Fabric. Last year, the company’s OneConnect technology subsidiary implemented a supply chain finance platform and built a trade finance blockchain released by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority.
Meanwhile, SingularityNET has previously partnered with Chinese firm Entertech, the Government of Malta, and UNESCO.
The AI lead for Ping An, Mr. Bai Meng, mentions the “future directions for collaboration include (but are not limited to) OCR and model training.”
Dr. Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET, also believes that the partnership has promise. He says: “Generally speaking, successful AI applications require at least four ingredients — AI algorithms, data, computer power, and human understanding of the problem domain. Between SingularityNET and Ping An we have all four of these in abundance, and so I am confident we will be able to do great things together.”
On June 18-19 2019 Hanson wade is running the Blockchain for Insurance conference in London. Ledger Insights is a media partner.
Neither the author nor any of the Ledger Insight’s team own SingularityNET tokens.
