Keynote 3: Blockchain – IoT – AI Trust Nexus

Summary form only given, as follows. The complete presentation was not made available for publication as part of the conference proceedings. Blockchain is the underlying technology behind Bitcoin and it is finding its way in the development of a variety of new software systems. With its innovative approach to decentralized computation and assets management, the blockchain has not only potential to solve a number of system scalability, reliability, security, and privacy issues, but also to revolutionize software systems development in a way similar to what the Internet did. For example, the integration of the blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) provides a promising new research and development direction that has generated significant research funding and venture capital investments. However, the lack of explanation when it comes to the decisions made by today's AI algorithms is a major drawback with respect to trust in such systems, e.g., deep neural networks do not offer control or reasoning over their internal processes. In this keynote talk, we present the trust issues common to blockchain – IoT – AI systems and their integration. We present some directions for achieving more trustworthy and explainable blockchain – AI – IoT system integration by leveraging features of blockchain, smart contracts, trusted oracles, and decentralized storage. We discuss a framework for complex AI systems in which the decision outcomes are reached based on decentralized consensuses of multiple AI predictors. Finally, we discuss few key application areas with practical use cases.