While unsettling on the surface, the idea of bias within an AI is not as controversial as you might imagine – it's almost required. As humans, we each have our own experiences and preferences which shape our viewpoint and our biases. Modern artificial intelligence consumes "training material" curated by humans to learn what's right or wrong for its particular task. Once trained, AI can help us with those tasks and is at its most useful when it's "instincts" match whomever it is working on behalf of.

In such a world, multiple sorts of value will be respected, quantified with a variety of smart contracts going far beyond the money-like tokens dominating the blockchain world today. The rich aesthetic, social, spiritual and imaginative value of humans, other animals, plants and new forms of self-organizing living systems will be supported and woven together with advanced digital and quantum technologies, without pressure to reduce the value of an entity to the degree of its participation in efficient processes of material production.

The Russian agency charged with collecting data to counter financial crimes has proposed building its own software to track cryptocurrency transactions and link them to users.

As well as blockchain, the effort employs AI to help predict the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic based on patient information including genetic profiles, medical records and prior treatment of the virus. Utilizing what's known as the Deep Intelligence AI platform, they can make predictions on the behavior of the virus by combining data and information from scientific journals, news articles and healthcare records.

Networking giant Cisco Systems selected the blockchain-based platform developed by SingularityNET to host its decentralized AGI project. Artificial General Intelligence is a branch of AI that focuses on a computer's ability to learn intellectual tasks. Whereas existing AI might learn to read characters on a page, for example, a true AGI system might intuit how to write the book. In a joint statement, Dr. Ben Goertzel, SingularityNET CEO, said, "The scale of the AGI deployments needed by a partner like Cisco is going to be tremendous, and we are working hard to make sure our AGI tools and our blockchain-based platform is up to the task." SingularityNET's platform democratizes AI by decentralizing its source, preventing any single force or player from hoarding computers' capacity to learn.

It's all part of a bid to unlock valuable data held in silos which will ultimately get autonomous vehicles on the road sooner. Exploratory work in this area is being done under the auspices of the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI), a consortium formed last year to harmonize the development of distributed ledger technology (DLT) across the "smart mobility" industry.

The U.K.'s University of Surrey has announced that it's securing digital government records of national video archives around the world against tampering using blockchain tech and artificial intelligence (AI). In a press release provided to CoinDesk, the university said its Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) has teamed up with the Open Data Institute and the National Archives in the U.K. to develop what it calls a "highly secure, decentralised computer vision and blockchain based system" called ARCHANGEL, which is designed to preserve the integrity of digital archives for the long term. Computer vision is a field in which computers are programmed to analyze and understand digital images or videos. The system "essentially provides a digital fingerprint for archives, making it possible to verify their authenticity," according to project lead at the University of Surrey, Professor John Collomosse. ARCHANGEL uses blockchain tech as a database maintained by a number of archives.

Nasdaq might be on the cusp of giving institutional investors an analytical edge on trading hundreds of crypto assets. According to a person familiar with the company's plans, the U.S. stock exchange is preparing to add tools for predicting the price movements of crypto assets to its Analytics Hub. The hub, launched last year, draws on machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to parse through social media and other alternative data sources to give investors a better way to assess market movement. To date, the Analytics Hub has focused on traditional assets, but the addition of crypto seems to be another signal of Wall Street's growing interest in the nascent sector. Bill Dague, Nasdaq's head of alternative data, told CoinDesk that "given the abundance of interest, we are exploring cryptocurrency related datasets." "Whether or not we launch a crypto-related product remains to be seen."

The New York-based medical school founded by Mount Sinai Hospital has launched a new research center focused on blockchain applications in healthcare. On Tuesday, The Icahn School of Medicine said the Center for Biomedical Blockchain Research would be created inside the school's Institute for Next Generation Healthcare, which researches the application of artificial intelligence, robotics, genomic sequencing, sensors and wearable devices in medicine, New York-based news organization Crain's reported. The center's staff will conduct academic research on blockchain in medicine, as well as create their own prototype networks. The possible use cases include drug development and preventing the sale of counterfeit drugs, clinical trials and a better research reproducibility, Healthcare IT News wrote. The new center will be run by Joel Dudley, executive vice president of Precision Health at Mount Sinai and a former senior data scientist at Pivotal Software, which researches the use of artificial intelligence in biology.