UPDATED 13:57 EDT / JULY 20 2018

EMERGING TECH

Blockchain company Aikon teams up with the Hubble Space Telescope for deep space research

Space is huge: The Milky Way, our own galaxy, alone may have more than 200 billion stars and our home is only one of many. The process of imaging and categorizing stars and other deep space phenomena is a slow process that involves a great deal of computer processing power.

To make this process easier, blockchain distributed application platform Aikon, operated by API Market Inc., announced Thursday the launch of what the company calls “CPU Tokens,” a type of digital currency used to fuel cloud processing. Aikon partnered with its first customer this week, the Space Telescope Science Institute or STScI, which is the science operations command division for the Hubble Space Telescope.

CPU Tokens are exchangeable for what is described as real-world nonvolatile value based on the average cost of computing power as charged by cloud hosting services such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud. The tokens themselves represent the cost of cloud processing on Aikon’s distributed application platform.

As of 2014, the Hubble telescope produced more than 844 gigabytes of data per month, the telescope observed over 38,000 celestial targets (stars, supernovae, gas clouds and other subjects) and more than 11,000 scientific papers had been written using that data.

A portion of that data produced by the Hubble telescope is in the form of deep space images of the sky, which include these subjects. The process of tagging and mapping the images can be processor intense, so Aikon came up with a solution similar to the distributed computing project SETI@home to assist STScI.

In 1999, the Berkeley SETI Research Center launched SETI@home, a volunteer-based massively distributed computational project that used a giant network of personal computers to assist with the worldwide “search of extraterrestrial intelligence,” or SETI project, by processing radio signals.

In a similar fashion, STScI will buy CPU tokens from Aikon, which would then be spent on progressing requests on Hadron Inc.’s cloud platform. The Hadron cloud uses image recognition AI that can be executed within everyday web browsers and uses distributed computing to automatically categorize millions of deep space images.

“We hope this new approach to research helps us better understand our universe and eventually also becomes the de facto standard for all blockchain-based application program interface transactions,” said Aikon co-founder and Chief Product Officer Marc Blinder.

To encourage users to run Hadron, the system pays users who execute the app in a web browser with micropayment bounties. With the app running across hundreds of thousands of systems, Hadron is capable of highly parallel artificial intelligence computations, which are extremely important for comparing data unknowns in images to knowns for the purpose of categorizing stellar subjects.

The Hadron platform also boasts extremely cheap processing power because of its highly distributed nature and the company claims that it’s more affordable and powerful than cloud solutions such as IBM Corp.’s Watson AI system. The company stated that its platform runs 10 times faster and at 90 percent lower processing costs thanks to this model.

And because Aikon would manage and invoice all currency transactions with CPU Tokens on its blockchain, the company would also be able to use the automated transactional database to track image processing and rewards to users at lower cost.

“As a government-funded organization, we are always looking for cost-effective solutions to better process Hubble images,” said Josh Peek, an associate astronomer and scientist at STScI. “Thanks to Aikon and Hadron, large organizations like us can use cryptocurrency for data processing projects — safely and reliably.”

Aikon provided further details about CPU Tokens and the Hadron cloud platform, which provides a free signup for users interested in joining, in the company’s announcement on Medium.

The company added that it will release specifications for third-party developers to use its Open Rights Exchange protocol, an application interface underlying its platform that will include a bounty program for developers interested in testing out the Hubble image processing API.

Image: Pixabay

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