We just completed another information-packed AMA — this time with Kambria’s CPO, Tingxi Tan. Below is a summary of great the questions we received along with corresponding answers — many of them related to the upcoming soft-launch of our platform on September 26th. For clarity, the original text has been lightly edited for grammar and spelling.
If you could not catch the AMA live, please post your question in our main Telegram channel. The team will get back to you quickly.
Wow!! Hello Tingxi Tan! So many questions we want to ask you. Can you tell us about the launch and what will be available?
We will be launching a couple of key features for our soft launch event:
1) Bounties and Competition (Innovation Marketplace)
2) KambriaVote
3) Codebase + KDNA
4) Kambria Store
5) Violation Management
Can you elaborate on the bounty? How do I participate as a dev?
The bounties are basically sponsored competitions, we have a few big companies and organizations lined up and will be pushing out these events in the coming weeks and months.
To participate, you will sign up as an individual or team on our platform. Conform to the rules and submit your result to Kambria’s codebase within the timeframe.
Once the winner is determined, the prize (converted to KAT) will be automatically disbursed to your codebase’s wallet. We will be guiding teams on the entire process so don’t worry about the details right now. More if will come later.
Hi Tingxi Tan… I would like to know more about your partnerships with universities. How is that going and how do you work with them and how will they participate on the Kambria Open Innovation Platform?
One of the upcoming events is a series of Hackathon that we are co-hosting with various Universities in the US like Stanford, UC Berkeley and potentially Columbia University. Technology coming out of these hackathons will be contributed back to Kambria.
We also have a close relationship with CMU and are working to integrate some of their vision technology into Ohmni which will eventually be open on Kambria. These are just a sample of things that we are working on with universities. More to come later so remember to subscribe to our blogs and news. [Links are provided at the end of this article.]
Hello everyone, I will be flying during the AMA but I do have a few questions for Tingxi Tan:
1. Why is open collaboration important for innovation?
2. Monopoly has resulted in a consolidation of power. Would decentralization of IP (IP owned by the community) help with a wider distribution of power?
3. Do you feel that profit sharing would alleviate the income divide between classes, between nations, between people?
1) Short answer, Synergy: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Long answer, please take a look at a blog post I wrote a while back discussing how breaking down the walls and cross-pollinating ideas across organizations will result in this synergy.
2) Absolutely, we are entering a new age of business model where sharing is becoming a core strategy for startups. Again, going back to your first question, once this synergy becomes apparent, with all the data and technology easily accessible out there, big companies will need to fall in line in other to move forward.
Of course, everyone has to be playing by the rules of the game in order to benefit from the system, and that is where blockchain, token economics driving by game theoretical incentives comes in.
3) Yes, it will alleviate but is definitely not the complete solution. Access to technology and education are still the biggest obstacles to large income inequality. Kambria’s big vision also includes such social impact agenda. By making technology accessible to everyone and providing an infrastructure to build these technologies, we hope it will make the world a better place. As cliche as it sounds, this is what we really believe it.
How will the bounty work at the University level? Will the bounty payout to the team, departments or individuals?
It will work just like any other bounties. The prize payout will be to the submitted solution, i.e. the codebase. Whoever has ownership of the codebase will be able to withdraw the prize. It is up to the team to decide on how to manage that.
Are you developing your own protocol or Dapps?
The first version of Kambria will be implemented as a collection of smart contracts on the Ethereum network. We are planning to launch our own chain in the near future with core functionalities built in.
The reason to do Dapps first is we want to launch the platform ASAP, get community participation ASAP and build up the Kambria ecosystem. If we wait until we finish development of our own chain and launch that will take too long.
What are you most excited about for the upcoming product launch?
The most exciting part is everything! This is like going to a restaurant and asking the Chef what is good, they will say everything in the menu! But seriously, we are happy to show what the dev team has been working on and gather feedback from people like you so we can iterate quickly.
I saw Prof. Manuela Veloso in the project, in which way does she contribute for Kambria?
Prof. Manuela and her team will help us integrate various technology into the Ohmni platform, which will be opened on Kambria. And being a well-known roboticist, she will advise us on development of the Kambria platform as robotics and AI is the first vertical we are tackling.
How do you acquire and develop codebase to suit with other verticals like biomedicine? Would it be different than robotics and AI?
Good question, this brings me to a point. Kambria as a company is not acquiring all this technology. We are building the infrastructure for the Kambria community to contribute technology for everyone. We are all Kambrian! Yes, Kambria facilitates in the process and builds out the repository but we definitely need the community to come together in order for this thing to flourish. So specifically for your question, we will be building the core infrastructure that is industry/technology/market agnostic. Our network spans many verticals and we will tap into each of those personally to kick start and seed the platform with all these cool technologies.
[You can read more about Kambria’s different verticals in this article.]
I saw a lot of infrastructure chains being your partners, can you elaborate on how you will use or work with them in technical terms?
Kambria’s big platform goal is to build an infrastructure for open innovation. We can’t (nor do we want to) do this alone. Imagine going out and building a wallet where there are already so many great wallet technologies out there. We want to bring and integrate them into the platform. Kambria is the ultimate integrator!
Are there any risks to my IP on the platform, with governments that have regulations?
IP is one of the trickiest things to solve especially when we taking Kambria global across jurisdictions. But we are absolutely committed to protecting everyone’s contribution and our big ammo is blockchain, transparency, and accountability.
How big is the Kambria team btw?
Kambria business unit is around 12 person. Engineering unit is 10 person so total of around 20 person team. But Kambria is not about quantity but quality. We have much synergy in our team and are tackling much bigger problem than a 20 person team can.
Hi Tingxi Tan, how are the bounties won or determined… who are the “judges”?
Good question, Rudy. We thought and did much research on this problem. We have developed a game theoretic judging algorithm, based on a 2-round judging event that will fairly award winner/s of a competition given that a set of initial conditions are satisfied. These initial conditions include where the judges are picked from, e.g. are they members from the bounty sponsor group, are they neutral industry experts, or are they from the developer community with ties to the competing teams.
So the work now is to develop this judge recommendation and selection protocol so our algorithm can be implemented. We will be publishing an academic paper soon on the judging algorithm.
Hi Tingxi Tan, are your smart contracts open source?
It wouldn’t be Kambria if we don’t practice the most fundamental aspect of our philosophy. Most of our smart contracts are open sourced with Apache 2.0 license. After our soft launch even we will be putting all these up on our Github repo.
This is sounding like a great project. Tingxi Tan, there is a lot of speculation of being scammed in the cryptoblock-o-verse (is that a thing ;P). Do you have any thoughts on how it will fair among others? Who directly competes with you?
Looks like a 2 part question Rudy.
1) We believe the crypto community is getting more well-informed by the day and can sniff out scams from legit miles away, so we will continue to do our part in educating the crypto crowd as a whole.
2) Believe it or not, open innovation is not new. There are many entities including big companies like Pfizer and governments that practice open innovation-ish initiatives.
However, in the blockchain space, I believe we are the first and only ones that are targeting open innovation using blockchain and have a vision that is bigger than any other government or organization. We are starting to see some copycats in the space (not to name names) but they are targeting specific verticals only. But again our philosophy is not to weed out the competitor but to integrate the good from everyone and encourage all open innovationist to contribute and participate in Kambria.
Can you talk more about the social impact vertical? What projects can we expect?
There is no social impact vertical per se, every vertical has projects that have social impact. For example, in the robotics space. Ohmni Labs is actively involved in the education space, allowing kids who cannot make it to school physically to attend classes through robots. As Kambria grows, Ohmnilabs will also be using technology from the community to build upon these projects with social impact.
Are the core services mainly developed by Kambria or they can be built by other innovators/developers on top of Kambria’s innovation chain?
Core services are developed by Kambria. We welcome other developers that want to contribute to the project.
[The end]
About Tingxi Tan — Co-Founder & CPO
Tingxi Tan has a background in cloud computing, network infrastructure and distributed system design. He has been active in Crypto Investment since 2010. He was responsible for building the global scale cloud infrastructure at a network startup. He graduated from MSc Computer Science U of Calgary and BSc Applied Math Western University.
About Kambria
Kambria is an open innovation blockchain project that enables and incentivizes collaboration in R&D, manufacturing, and commercialization of advanced technology. We are developing our own public chain with protocols uniquely designed to address the current waste and inefficiencies in today’s innovation model. Kambria will allow for many verticals, including Biotech, Space, and Autonomous Vehicles to be developed and thrive in the ecosystem. We are focusing first on the AI and Robotics vertical with the backing of our well-established robotics company, OhmniLabs. Through existing partnerships with top universities and large international corporations, as well as access to talented developers, we aim to build an ecosystem that can bring the next wave of frontier technology to provide value to billions of people around the world.
Thank you for your time!
The Kambria Team!
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