Work X (Compute-to-SSI)

OceanDAO Round 11
#1

Hi OceanDAO community,

With great enthusiasm we are announcing the launch of our private sale. After designing & validating the ‘Compute-to-SSI’ architecture with the help of an Ocean DAO grant, we were able to finish the whitepaper and present our proposition. Within a week we have received an overwhelming amount of pledged allocations from private investors. With over $1.5M in pledged allocations, the seed round is almost fully subscribed. Because of this prospect, we have decided to fund round 11 ourselves and apply for a grant of 1$, a symbolic amount to remain part of the ecosystem and see if the Ocean community values our Compute-to-SSI proposition.

IMPORTANT!

We would like to kindly ask you only to vote with one single voting unit, your voting power should be going to other projects that need the funding.

Some highlights of our project:

:busts_in_silhouette: Team expanded to 10 employees, and 6 external advisors (including a legal board member of the Ethereum Foundation)

:office: Launching enterprise client who paid €150.000 for a pilot (large financial institution with >3.000 employees)

:inbox_tray: Filled pipeline with 43 enterprises in 14 different industries with >1.000 employees who are interested in listing vacancies on the Work X platform

:eu: Supported and funded by the European Commission within an 8 month accelerator program called eSSIF-lab

:moneybag: Negotiating with 6 VC funds for the seed round of our commercial company called WorkPi (expected valuation of €9-11 million)

:link: Won the SSI track on the largest AI & Blockchain hackathon called Odyssey Momentum last year

:dna: Partnership with DataUnion (To be announced!)

:tv: Featured on Dutch TV: Introduction to WorkPi & Work X - YouTube

:globe_with_meridians: New website launched: Work X

:memo: Whitepaper & Pitch deck published:

Work_X_Whitepaper-V3.pdf (1.9 MB)

Work_X_investorsdeck_compressed.pdf (1.9 MB)

We are always looking for people that can contribute to the project. Feel free to fill in our whitelist here:

Part 1 - Proposal Submission

Name of Project

Work X - Compute-To-SSI

Proposal in one sentence

Use Compute-To-Data algorithms on data enclosed in personal Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) wallets without compromising privacy, we call this Compute-To-SSI.

Description of the project and what problem is it solving

While personal data being protected and governed with SSI wallets can guarantee privacy of that data, currently A.I. algorithms are not able to learn from it. This is a large barrier for adoption. Furthermore we find that the companies that do want to share data using Self Sovereign Identity, prefer to keep their own copy. In some cases like governments this is a necessity, however in many situations it is not.

If private personal data would only exist in SSI wallets, using Compute-To-SSI would enable companies not only to benefit from reduced GDPR risk, it would allow them to learn from this personal data without having to possess it.

Historically, enterprises are very hesitant to share data with other companies, due to privacy concerns and ultimately losing their competitive advantage. This cripples their ability to train an accurate A.I. and gather valuable insights. Besides machine learning algorithms still being able to learn from the data given back to the individual, it could also learn from the data provided by other companies/entities. A Compute-To-SSI mechanism could enable a data driven revolution, as it would grant access to an enormous decentralized pool of data to learn from. By doing so, this will greatly increase the accuracy of these algorithms.

We feel this research area has the potential to let people and organisations benefit from Artificial Intelligence models, which are now exclusively available to tech giants, while preserving privacy.

At WorkPi we are building a decentralized Internet of Jobs, and provide a SaaS solution to enterprises to assess and educate their employees. By doing so, we are creating one of the many valuable use cases that will be enabled by the compute-to-SSI model. After all, besides skills & education information, there are many other types of data that a person can add to their personal data wallet (e.g. health, wearable, cookies, identity or finance data).

This solution will feature the ability to export and import your career related profile to an SSI wallet. In order to become compliant and future proof we are participating in the eSSIF* program of the European Commission, and integrate with the EBSI blockchain**

*https://essif-lab.eu/
**EBSI

We strongly believe in giving back personal data to individuals. We see this as a win-win for both the individual as well as enterprises and the key to both fair economic and personal success. However, at this point the problem remains how to learn from this private data.

We decided to work with Ocean Protocol as they have presented innovative solutions, with a strong focus on retaining privacy of data in large silo’s (e.g. hospitals). We aim to take this one step further; directly into the pockets of the people. People will be able to easily give access to specific data as well as revoke it. At the same time, A.I. algorithms will get the ability to learn from this data, all while preserving privacy.

While this will be no easy feat to accomplish, all technical components required to achieve this goal already exist. At WorkPi we are prepared to embark on this grand voyage of the world’s Ocean with you, to improve the ecosystem.

In order to succeed, this project has to be planned carefully and architected precisely with secured partners in the ecosystem.

We want to be very clear about the fact that from the beginning a series of grants is required before we can realize the end goal. An open-source reference implementation that any wallet can use to enable any kind of machine learning on any type of private data, for any purpose they desire. WorkPi will be amongst the first companies to use this in conjunction with the European Blockchain for career related data.

Grant Deliverables Round 11:

Deliverable 1:

Since we want to be absolutely sure that what we are building is the right approach, we want to validate our architecture with external parties. In order to do this alliances have been forged with machine learning, edge computing and security specialists while more are being under negotiation as we speak.

Validate the architecture with experts in the following fields:

  • Data Science
  • Security
  • Privacy
  • Edge computing

Deliverable 2:

The Compute-To-SSI architecture has to fit well within the wallet software, to ensure this we need to firstly identify a set of open source wallets that are compatible with EBSI and have sufficient adoption to succeed. And then align with the wallet dev-teams on how to implement receiving ocean algo’s and training them, to see if our architecture is the most optimal solution, and implement possible improvements.

Which category best describes your project?

Build / improve applications or integrations to Ocean

Which Fundamental Metric best describes your project?

Consumer Volume: Compute-To-SSI enables machine learning algorithms to learn from private data that is currently not accessible. This would significantly increase the consumer volume. Also, the open-source reference implementation can be used by other projects to apply machine learning on private data driving adoption further.

What is the final product?:

Being able to learn from data residing in SSI wallets that are compliant with European legislation. This means the highest standard of privacy must be implemented.

How does this project drive value to the “fundamental metric” (listed above) and the overall Ocean ecosystem?

There will be at least one new dataset listed which contains the career information of the dataset participants, stored in their SSI wallets. This data will be consumed by a lot of algorithms to generate statistics and machine learning algorithms on top of this data.

To prove and quantify the added value of Compute-To-SSI for the Ocean Ecosystem we have created four different calculations:

  1. Value created & validated by WorkPi with a career data use-case
  2. Total potential value across other use-cases and entities within the eSSIF ecosystem.

1. Value created & validated by WorkPi with a career data use-case

Using WorkPi, people gather career-related data about their skills, characteristics & preferences with assessments or development courses. This type of information can be compared to a LinkedIn profile (although it will be a lot richer because the user is stimulated to track their detailed achievements due to the privacy friendliness).

In 2015 an article revealed that the value of a LinkedIn profile when selling, equals $0,40 while it is being re-sold for ~$200. This means that the intermediary is earning a commission fee of $199,60 which equals an astonishing 49900%. To put this in perspective: currently Apple is under fire for charging a 30% fee in their App Store.

In our calculation we decided to pick an average selling-value of $100, a price that matches the value that we personally received on conferences to share our LinkedIn profile with prominent parties doing data analytics.

Since the buyer does not purchase full access to the profile, but instead only the right to train their A.I. algorithm on the data, we have to take 80% of the profile value because we estimate 60% of the times data is accessed, it is to train an A.I. algorithm. This brings the value of one profile, for machine learning purposes only, to: 0,6 * $100 = $60

WorkPi is currently in the last phase of building the application for our launching client; a large finance company in The Netherlands with ~3.000 employees. Based on this product we are building a SaaS solution for ~40 interested enterprises (which have >1.000 employees in around 14 different industries). The final user group will be onboarded using Work X; our decentralised platform for work where job candidates can participate in the same assessments & development courses as employees. Work X will be launched late 2021 and we expect 2.000-5.000 users in the early phase of the project. Although we expect a large number of users from multiple sources, we are projecting a modest amount of 1.500 users in our calculation.

ROI calculation grants:

* Bang = 1.500 profiles * $60 = $90.000
* Buck = $ 20.000 (hypothetical since we're not requesting a grant)
* % chance of success = 80%

Expected ROI = $90.000 / $10.000 * 0,80 = 7,2

2. Total potential value across other use-cases and entities within the eSSIF ecosystem.

WorkPi will participate in an 8-month programme of eSSIF-Lab, supported and funded by the European Commission. Because of large involved governmental stakeholders in this ecosystem (e.g. Spain, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium), the total potential upside of this grant proposal is very large. The integration with the eSSIF ecosystem is a large process that could take up to 7 rounds.

Please find the full cost forecast here:

  • The EU counts around 447 million citizens. In this calculation we project an early adoption rate of 5%.
  • About 86% of these people have access to internet (2018)
  • Although we expect that the value of the data that can be linked to an SSI wallet greatly exceeds that of just the career-related data (given the broad amount of data types), we also use a value of $60 dollars in this calculation.

ROI calculations:

* Bang = 447 million * 0.86 * $60 * 0.05 = $1.153 billion
* Buck = 6 * 10.000 = $240.000 (hypothetical since we're not requesting a grant)
* % chance of success = 70%

Expected ROI = $1.153.260.000 / $120.000 * 0,70 = 13.454 (yes, that’s a lot… we believe that this could be a billion dollar grant given the growing global importance of AI and data privacy).

Funding Requested:

$1

Proposal Wallet Address

0x6131C5bBe0FA34Dc0F96E931BcA3E611A5199EEF

Have you previously received an OceanDAO Grant?

Yes

Team Website:

Twitter Handle:

@Rikrapmund

@daniel_de_witte

Discord Handle:

Rik Rapmund#5093

Daniel de Witte#9812

HiddeKehrer#4283

Project lead Contact Email:

rik@workpi.com

daniel@workpi.com

hidde@workpi.com

Country of Residence:

The Netherlands

Part 2 - Proposal Details

Mockups & Designs

Teaser pitch deck HR use-case:
WorkPi Teaser Pitch Deck _compressed.pdf (1.4 MB)

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Screenshot 2021-10-04 at 17.49.26
Screenshot 2021-10-04 at 17.49.261034×1614 181 KB
Screenshot 2021-10-04 at 17.48.53
Screenshot 2021-10-04 at 17.48.532002×1254 314 KB

2048×1536 480 KB

2048×1534 450 KB
2048×1532 565 KB

Technologies

  • NodeJS
  • Typescript
  • React
  • Storybook
  • Adobe XD
  • GraphQL
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Azure
  • Self Sovereign Identity
  • Python
  • Solidity

Methodologies

  • Microservices Framework
  • Continuous Integration
  • Event Based Messaging
  • Flexible Data Model
  • Privacy Oriented Design
  • Recursion
  • Federated Server System
  • Isomorphic Rolebased Authorization

Project Deliverables - Roadmap

Beyond the scope of this grant proposal we have designed a roadmap to show the long term goal of the entire project:

  • Training with Zero Knowledge (For example Apple’s FaceID faced acceptance problems, even though only the weights of the trained model were sent back to the server)

  • Create a security model that can guarantee the privacy of an individual’s data while being visited by machine learning algorithms. (Zero Knowledge Proofs could help here)

  • Create a reference implementation in one of the chosen wallets.

  • Keep expanding wallet support to grow the ecosystem of wallets able to host Ocean machine learning algorithms.

  • Utilize A.I. chips in phones to speed up calculations, reduce energy consumption and keep your phone cool.

Team members

  1. Rik Rapmund
  1. Daniel de Witte
  1. Hidde Kehrer
  1. Steven van der Graaf
  1. Joseph Groot-Kormelink
  1. Niek Naber

  1. Pavlik Kiselev - Quality Assurance

  2. Alex Basmanov - Front-End developer

  3. Tiberiu Paliuc - Graphic designer

  4. Kirill Ryadchin - Junior front-end developer

Additional Information

  • WorkPi participates in the eSSIF development trajectory from the European Commision to enable individuals to regain control over their work related data using Self Sovereign Identity.

  • WorkPi has an enterprise launching client called APG.

  • WorkPi is a member of the Dutch Blockchain Coalition.

2 Likes
#2

Congratulations guys! Thank you for your impressive work!