Blockathon

Blockchain Summer Institute 2025 Blockathon

2025 Blockathon: Blockchain & Responsible AI – July 17-19th 2025

For the second year in a row, the Blockathon for Social Good will focus on Blockchain & Responsible AI.  

Artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly developed in the past two years, largely due to the widespread adoption of ChatGPT and other large language models. This progress has led industry experts and governments to anticipate the dawn of an AI era characterized by heightened automation, efficiency, and productivity. Startups and established organizations have begun to invest billions of dollars into AI development, ranging from infrastructure, industry software, to consumer applications. Many industries are attempting to adopt AI, for example, the pharmaceutical industry seeks to use AI to accelerate drug discovery and the finance industry aims to use AI to automate banking and trading,

Despite AI's immense potential to revolutionize industries and economies, scientists have warned of its risks. Biased AI algorithms, for instance, can reinforce discrimination, while the lack of transparency in AI training models raises concerns about data privacy and usage. Moreover, AI may disrupt the labor market, render many occupations irrelevant, and erode the boundary between human lives and machinery. To harness the benefits of AI while mitigating risks, governments worldwide are actively exploring AI regulations.

  1. Recently, the concept of responsible AI has gained much attention among scientists and industry leaders. According to IBM, responsible AI refers to “a set of principles guiding the design, development, deployment, and use of AI, fostering trust in solutions that empower organizations and stakeholders” (https://www.ibm.com/topics/responsible-ai). Specifically, responsible AI entails that:
    AI systems must be aligned with ethical principles, human values, and societal norms. This includes respect for human dignity, privacy, autonomy, fairness, transparency, accountability, and non-discrimination.
  2. AI systems need to be explainable and transparent. Developers should be able to explain how they develop AI models, what data they use, how they access the data, and what factors influence outcomes.
  3. AI systems should be fair. It should not reinforce social bias based on gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability etc, especially when it comes to hiring and accessing healthcare.
  4. Responsible AI should not evade people’s rights to privacy. AI systems should only collect, use, and retain personal data for legitimate purposes and with individuals' informed consent, and should not expose people’s sensitive information.
  5. Responsible AI prioritizes security and should be resistant to various security attacks.
  6. AI systems must be held accountable. Mechanisms for auditing, oversight, and recourse in case of adverse impacts or violations must be in place.

Experts argue that blockchain technology can play a pivotal role in realizing responsible AI. Blockchain, a distributed ledger characterized by immutability, transparency, and a tamper-proof nature, offers advantages in enhancing the fairness of AI systems, for example, through greater security, privacy, and transparency. By integrating blockchain with AI systems, users gain visibility into data sources and model training processes, while regulators can audit compliance with regulatory requirements. Some initiatives aim to develop blockchain-based data marketplaces for AI, where individuals retain control over their data and smart contracts automate data sharing. Others propose applying decentralized governance structures such as DAOs to AI development, ensuring democratic decision-making and reflecting the interests of the majority. The emerging field of decentralized physical infrastructure has much overlap with AI development, providing decentralized environments to enable greater security, privacy, and accountability in AI development.

In this year’s Blockathon for Social Good, students will build upon the progress made in 2024. Students will be tasked with addressing a specific challenge relating to responsible AI that blockchain can solve, by enhancing the capabilities of ClioX, a prototype solution to establish a fair data AI ecosystem over blockchain for historical archives and other cultural institutions. ClioX builds upon the PontusX ecosystem, which brings together a multitude of companies and institutions from different fields and industries, such as AirBus, EUPro Gigant, DeltaDAO, Cooperants, Gaia-X, Exoscale, TU Wien, IONOS, Wobcom, Stats Bibliotek zu Berlin, TU Darmstadt, BigChain DB, Materna, Neusta Aerospace, S Software AG, Exaion, and Arsys.

Judging Criteria
 

First Nations land acknowledegement

We acknowledge that the UBC Point Grey campus is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm.


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