Harjyot Singh on human and machine collaboration at Human Protocol

0:01i'm ash and addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have harry singh the technology director of human protocol harry welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time to come on thank you for having me on this pleasure you're very welcome i'd love to kick off our conversation by just hearing a

0:22little bit about yourself how you first got involved in blockchain your role at human protocol and about human protocol and what are the initiatives that your team is working on sure that's a very broad passion to begin with let's see so yeah i initially held from india i moved to uk in 2013 to study artificial intelligence and computer

0:49science at the university of edinburgh you know did the whole shfield four years in edinburgh beautiful city got exposed to a lot of emerging technologies because such a center such a hub for the emerging tech especially yeah got together with a few friends you know the classic story we were having beer in university someone introduced you know have you looked at

1:14this coin ethereum and i was like no but what's the tech behind it and suddenly it just got really interesting and i took a deep dive there during my time at university obviously you know worked through quite a few startups a variety of spaces made financial tech be it energy be it classic you know music apps like spotify back then it was quite small and then by the time i was

1:39graduating i was like you know what i need to do something on my own of course with the exposure to ai and the blockchain side of things as well i kicked off my own startup called edger now it's called providence which initially focused on detecting plagiarism for artists and musicians online and kind of rewarding them using blockchain and ai so that was a nice

2:02thing but that track obviously did not go anywhere because turns out it's very hard to impose so we kind of had the whole tech out and built something that we decided was you know we could see it was very important for the industry which is misinformation detection so provenance now proudly serves over like 50 different clients from news channels to independent media outlets

2:29and soon a consumer offering as well where we detect what could be out of context media place in a particular news we do basic fact checking we try to kind of you know take a step beyond it and also evaluate what would be the bias behind this particular piece of misinformation but obviously that company luckily for me ran so well that i decided okay it's

2:53time for me to take a step back and try new avenues and i met one of humans co-founders and you know sounded like an interesting project something different a real application of core blockchain technology and something i really passionately care about you know like the diversification of jobs across the globe and making jobs accessible for everyone and i was hooked and so yeah i

3:20joined human protocol back then which is almost what almost coming to two years now joined as a software architect now as i was the technology director where under me we are managing the product the core tech some parts of the technical partnerships the overall ecosystem development and even our marketing efforts so yeah amazing thank you for the background

3:46harry and yeah it is great now to with these blockchain organizations you know just working with people around the world and around the clock as well you know blockchain never sleeps and so it is very exciting i would love to dive a little bit more into human protocol and you know i know you're the technology director maybe you can talk a little bit about the protocol but also

4:09just about the vision of the platform sure i mean i'll keep it simple right like this is my one-line sphere for it's that essentially we are building decentralized infrastructure that powers dual side and marketplaces where kind of humans and machines can collaborate to solve any fungible cost so now this is a very loaded sentence so let's take it step by step right like

4:35if you look back at early 2010s we see that there was an emerging trend a part of economy that wasn't realized before technology could be at a level and that is dual sided marketplaces right which means that there is someone probably on this side of the world on this side of the city or you know not even in the near physical space field who wants something

4:59done it could be a physical job or it could be you know getting your food delivered like or it could be taking you from one place to the other or it could be someone designing a logos you know sky is the limit on what the person wants done and there is someone on the opposite side that can deliver that and can deliver that well and so you saw platforms like swiggy

5:22uber uber eats all these platforms image and these are essentially what dual side and marketplaces are so we at human kind of looked and said wait actually there is an abstract level where you can you know all these different platforms have something in common and that is basically a four step process there is a process of job creation there is a process of matching this job

5:46to a particular person who can solve it based on their skills availability et cetera then there is the work actually being done and the verification of how this work was done and then there is obviously the settlements and the person getting the solution right and so you abstract it away and suddenly turns out you can do you can just create an engine that

6:09powers marketplaces like this so say uber was being born today they wouldn't have to go and build out that tech they would just leverage human protocols to build that platform out and they could just focus on the business development you know really focusing on their domain expertise in the mobility department focus on the marketing focus on the pr and just drive that

6:33funnel of getting the users on both sides and the technology we would handle now why do this in a decentralized way and not a centralized way right why because most of these companies are doing it in a centralized manner well for one thing if you are say the driver there or the food delivery pests in there these companies just because of the way

6:55they have control over your profile the centralized manner of control they can just decide not to pay you out or charge you penalties or really call your work obsolete and should they be doing that should they be the judge to do that no right if you do it in an entirely decentralized permissionless manner we as a protocol that engine the technology engine have no safe

7:20in that part of the process you know and it's all governed by multiple actors playing in the system in different parts with the oracles we the validators who kind of support and just do that for you and another example i like to highlight as a worker why it's very interesting is you're in vietnam or you know some emerging country do you really trust the

7:44banking systems to pay you out in time or do you trust an automated software system that you can see in front of you to pay you out in time where you can actually go within a few minutes and go and spend that money that you want so yeah i think that's the protocol in a nutshell definitely great explanation terry and i think you put the nail you know in the head there on the

8:07settlement obviously that's going to be super important if you have that the blockchain there then you don't have to trust the other party to ensure that they're going to pay you or they're going to pay you on time or they're going to pay you enough or you know that the service that they actually did it and they said that it was complete so obviously

8:25that's super important and i really like how you started off the conversation by just like saying this is gonna open a huge door for so many different you know the uber of this of that there's so many service applications that are being built for different industries that are bringing in automation like we've never seen before which is very fascinating i would

8:49love to know a little bit more about where exactly your the team is at with the protocol you know are there already other uber apps running on the technology right now or where is your team at with it sure i mean we kind of have the initial version of the protocol already running on ethereum main net so this end to end process that i just described to

9:10you is live and available on the api remainder just because of our existing let's say domain expertise we kind of built our own first marketplace on top so you can call it the human protocol machine learning marketplace and that is thriving with one of our partner projects h capture that utilizes human protocol to deliver captures which don't need just stop thoughts

9:40But also reward users who are actually participating in that process and that kind of you know so you are having one side of the marketplace so you want to like oh capture so what does it sell what purpose does it sell actually captures are used to train advanced machine learning models somewhere so we have the suppliers who provide us that image labeling and you know fine tuning

10:01that they want we are pushing it by capture through the human app on the ethereum main net where people can you know solve those captures and earn money in a way and i mean you know we are adding more for tools like capture on the ml marketplace called cvat which is intel software that's coming soon there's a tool called inception which can help with ml text

10:26data labeling but that's going to come quite soon as well but that's kind of what we tried to just build on our own we also just created something called the human grants program where we want to go out into the ecosystem develop that ecosystem and say okay if you have an interesting idea and interesting marketplace model that you want to explore you have the domain

10:50expertise to deliver that come and apply and we will give you funding between 50 to 250 000 and we'll provide you the technical support the business expertise everything and yeah build on top of human so hopefully within in the very near future we're gonna see a lot of new interesting marketplaces on us very cool i'm looking forward to that and speaking about applying i'm curious

11:19on the matching protocol to have somebody fulfill a job you know there's probably millions of people around the world that could potentially do that job is it just first come first serve or is there algorithms and ai that determines you know who would best be the best person to actually fill this job when they're applying like how does that work sure i mean

11:43just first comes first serve is not a good business model here right it's not a technological sound solution either so actually we use a combination of multiple parameters again not controlled by us they're third-party actors who run these various oracles that kind of first determine the earners skill sets you know what they are specialized in

12:08and you know as they keep on doing the jobs that skill set levels are adjusted then there is other metrics like their availability their delivery time the quality of their work etc etc that's kind of evaluated by these external oracles and then again adjusted per job that they do we kind of get a rating system there where you know the matching almost

12:31becomes stabilized and quite successful and you know there's penalties in place and then there's other things like you know the amount of hmt for example or any other token that you want through a platform that you hold on that influences it well so it's quite a complex system but yeah no not first comparison and of course this is machine intelligence coming in as well you know

12:55really optimizing that matching process yeah definitely and you were talking about holding tokens there i know we talked about the settlement you know having a decentralized system i would love to know about the tokens if there is a human token that will be also involved in whether you hold it or if there's other functionalities in the ecosystem sure i mean we do have a

13:19human token it's on ethereum main net we are kind of diversifying into the first evm compatible side chains right now where we have already taken part of that bridge process and etc and the human token is essentially a utility oriented token right it serves a part in multiple parts of these processes be it for various oracles validators for settlement it depends on

13:47what the creator and what the earner of the job wants to do so it's a lot of flexibility we just recently actually did a pointless phrase which was i think if i'm not wrong the biggest sale by the number of participants or something like this so yeah there's a lot of active community members who are very interested in the growth of the human token and i mean there's more

14:11information on the entire tokenomics on our website already as well and you know our papers are out there so if you are curious go and read that otherwise it's going to take the whole of the whole amount of time we have here to explain how it feels sounds great and you talked about the grants program there you talked about having accounts where people can build

14:33up their reputations and provide services i was looking at this ambassador program are you are you focused on the ambassadorship or are you just looking for developers service providers everybody to help contribute to the ecosystem sure i mean the ambassadors program is kind of our first foray into building those diverse communities that we're looking for right because the

15:00owners are just not gonna come from say even english-speaking countries like you know you have the northern america and you have the europe they should ideally come from all over the world we are human political and ambassadors are our first educators creators moderators organizers and campaigners who are gonna penetrate those deeply local maybe even not

15:23english-speaking communities and really help us reach that kind of a crowd apart from the ambassador program as well we have just recently launched the dead bounty program we kind of want to build a healthy community of developers who are actively contributing to the human protocols development features bugs and really getting rewarded for it so you know we're utilizing other

15:48platforms like bitcoin our internal platform as well everything's on github so yeah it's interesting times and we see a lot of traffic coming through these channels that's great to hear and maybe you can talk about the roadmap moving forward into 2022 you know what are the major things that you and your team are looking to deliver out and what will we

16:08see from human next year sure i think this one fundamental thing that we are very hell-bent on which is demonstrating our utility and actually getting people to work and you know create jobs and money and all this stuff so the first four into this was our human app which is kind of your one portal to accessing the human protocol as an earner

16:33and you already have you know a lot of users coming in and doing different kind of jobs it's about scaling that on a ground level along with this i think we realized quite early on that you know just because we are on the ethereum main net sometimes it's it's not scalable for a high transaction volume protocol like us so we are pouring into you know deeper

16:59partnerships with some of the biggest names you know iran solana hedera there is polygon coming up avalanche and we're gonna just try and distribute this protocol on to as many networks as possible and getting the rewards of that to the human app to the ins another part of this is obviously the ecosystem development as i said the ambassador program the dev

17:24bounty program one bounty programs are really important to us because the you know we need to reach out to those people and we need to get them actively involved in human protocol we are our foundation at the end of the day and getting the community to run majority parts of it is kind of our goal and our focus is going to be a lot on there as well very cool thank you for that harry and

17:47for those ambassadors and developers and everybody who's interested in contributing or participating learning more about human protocol what's the best way for them to get involved our website humanprotocol.org go there is extensive documentation on you know how do you contribute how do you participate there's the application process for

18:11ambassador program live there you can go and apply if you are one of those community members who want to build those communities if you're a developer there's a dev bounty program again everything is written out there's a nice apply here button as well you can click and start working and of course there's the grants program so if you're an entrepreneur an

18:28organization or maybe an individual developer with a cool idea in your niche space where you have a dominant expertise go and apply i would love to speak to you and get to know you more great thank you so much for taking the time to come on i will leave all those human protocol links in the description box below that you mentioned so people can get involved

18:47if they'd like and all the best let's follow up in the near future in 2022 and i'd love to hear more about what your team's working on thank you ashley yeah looking forward to it