of Nectar: Social Trials

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

A social trial app, clinical trials as a social medium, leveraging the proliferation of individual involvement in social media to obtain data on self administered trials while compensating users.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

Edward Diamond

MSc in STEM from Washington University in St Louis

BA in Finance from Michigan State

Experience includes quant research for large global corporations that where advanced statistical models are employed to decompose asset price processes.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

The outcome of our proposed solution is a mobile/web app with AI services that allows users to join & create studies that users around the world can participate in. Users maintain ownership over their data and can license their data for 1) fiscal stimulus, and 2) track their progress towards a specific objective, and 3) participate in a global research initiative to drive human health insight. These goals are furthered through connecting to external data sources including Sensor based apis, genetic data, etc, that can make study data more valuable to research institutions globally.

We are interested in the data generating process surrounding human involvement in “intervention” events and their health effects. Our technological innovation will be a “social trial” platform, i.e. clinical trials as a social medium. Clinical trials are often the defacto standard when studying health effects in humans. These social “trials” will take advantage of the proliferation of individual involvement in social media to obtain diverse and extensive data on human self administered trials, this real-time aggregation of user data, manual and sensor based inputs, will generate fiscal stimulus for the user through a market value system, will be used to train/deploy a proprietary real-world applicable artificial intelligences for health discovery, and allow research organizations/individuals unparalleled access to information on health processes, while motivating creative, and evolving, efforts to understand fundamental health relationships for each individual and the world. 

Our Value proposition is that through the adoption of this innovative approach, and technology, people will be able to jointly benefit their fiscal, and health, profiles individually, while also contributing to further knowledge, and scope, of research into humans globally and pushing forward the adoption of Cardano. Non-geographical based clinical studies through user driven data will scale research with the number of users, and studies, as research reaches a broader scope of individuals, and wider set of social trials hypotheses. Our Objective is achievable through innovation in applying a scalable AI network that allows for the application of deep learning to sparse, subjective, and bias-potentialed data, where up to this point most clinical studies are analyzed through relatively linear, low utility statistics with low out of sample predictability, and relatively small sample sizes. The problem with using deep learning in this setting has traditionally been that of a “black box” in decision inference, and that training models require large compute, constant retraining and testing, and enough quality data for deployment into commercial applications, that we solve through a curated use of our platform’s generated IP.

Our perspective on the utilization of the Cardano network within our framework is one where the user would be able to collect their rewards from from data licensing agreements via Cardano wallets such as Yoro.

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

Adequate adoption of the proposed solution would constitute a huge win for Cardano's ecosystem as individuals globally become aware of/participate in the real world adoption of Cardano as it gets ingrained into everyday living while servicing under-researched aspects of how blockchain technology can improve the physiological/fiscal health of each individual.

• Large technology companies have gained increasing control over data we generate, this data is repurposed to serve needs of the that organization at the expense of those responsible for creating the data. This project will work towards reclaiming ownership over our own data, and using it to serve the purpose of betterment at the individual/societal level.
• Many search engines today suggest websites to visit from user queries based on textual embedding that can be taken advantage of, prominent website owners can then garner outsized user participation only to direct them to shops where businesses make money off of a user who was only trying to understand how to improve themselves. Our technology will go towards de-biasing health recommendations through a data first approach.
• Technological improvements in statistical learning have so far largely benefited a small group, this project will provide each individual the data required to advance their health agendas while benefiting the global research community.

Further, this proposal is exposed to "governance systems" as governments can license data from its populous to understand the health outcomes of its peoples while providing a likeness of universal basic income to each person through the licensing fee.

• By collecting data on individuals from arbitrary geographical locations, various institutions can then use this information for advanced good agendas. For example, is a certain city likely to be affected by industrial run-off? By analyzing health outcomes of economies near these factories we can provide data to back up legislative efforts to create safer environments.

The overall reach of our proposed solution is one that truly integrates Cardano as a payment system to vast population base with implications to truly create a world where Cardano is utilized and accessed by large proportions of global populations.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

Adoption risk will be the main barrier to success. However there are development barriers that are introduced through the strategy of mobile first prioritization that will require collaboration.

This will be mitigated through distribution efforts such as partnering with hospitals, universities, gyms, local governments (where applicable), and institutions to give them a platform to study the effect of various interventions on health outcomes.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

This is a One Year project proposal:

BUDGET

See below response

TIMELINE

Month 1:

1. Management - Consultations on research risks with to remedy with relative communications made to appropriate team. Catch complications early.
2. Research - Curate datasets from hospitals/institutions/gov(clinicaltrials.gov) for evaluation of proposed machine learning architecture vs traditional inference models.
3. Development - Work within communication guidelines from management to build first iteration of UI and database systems for mobile systems.

Month 3:

1. Management - Begin interacting with outside institutions for data onboarding and user generation.
2. Research - Begin testing proposed architectures on curated, and collected datasets.
3. Development - Work within communication guidelines from management to build first iteration of UI and database systems for mobile systems.

Month 6:

1. Management - Start drafting strategy for post funding timeline. Do we need to seek additional funding, do we need extra research/developers. Look for collaborative opportunities i.e. SingularityNet AI marketplace, NSF funding, etc.
2. Research - Begin finalizing model(s), and start research paper to help with publicity. This paper will not divulve sensitive IP but will focus on securing a position of knowledge within the health/AI space.
3. Development - Integrate at scale the use of the AI into the platform.

Month 9:

1. Management - Continue to monitor progress internally, and externally so as to increase the chances of further funding.
2. Research - Integrate online training/validation mechanisms into the platform to simulate few/zero shot learning in real time environment.
3. Development - Work to improve existing infrastructure, catch bugs, and build off of user recommendations. Around month 9 we will start to collect a small number of users for a beta test. These users will be leveraged to fine tune the application, complete UX research, and reach a level of success to be ready for VC pitches.

Month 12:

1. Management - Securing additional funding for project continuation, development of adoption plans for various countries/communities.
2. Research - Deployment of models for use in flutter application.
3. Development - Launching mobile application to Google/Apple app stores, and web app.

MILESTONES

Development

Flutter App that has base functionality for users to join/create studies according to arbitrary specifications.

Add main interactive dashboard that tracks user data for self study.

Allow data dumps from individuals / institutions.

Embed pricing algorithm for licensing fees into application.

Enable licensing payments to users per the pricing algorithm and market demand via cardano blockchain.

Enable peer-to-peer search and consultation functionality. This allows users to pay for consultations from other users who are similar (by some feature vector of stored data) and have achieved an objective that the requestee needs advice on.

Research

Curate applicable clinical trial datasets.

Create research codebase for the evaluation of advanced statistical models that leverage complex clinical trial interactions against traditional statistical models used in clinical trial inference. (tree based models, elastic net, lars, etc).

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

All numbers are USD.

Salaries

Research - 22,002

Development - 22,002

Management - 6,001

All funds raised will go towards employing a suite of researchers, developers, and principal investigators for the course of one year. After which further funding, from any source, will be considered for further work/marketing.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

Contractor (MD)

Internationally renowned clinical and translational investigator, who is recognized for many scientific contributions, including within the field of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility. His contributions include publications of over 510 peer reviewed manuscripts, 135 chapters, and 825 abstracts. He has been funded by six NIH Institutes, including NICHD to conduct randomized clinical trials utilizing the euglycemic, hyperinsulinemic clamp and hyperglycemic clamp techniques to evaluate the role of androgens on insulin sensitivity in men and women.  

His knowledge will be utilized to make sure we adhere to research and government based standards when dealing with human data.

Flutter/Blockchain Developers

Experience developing web/mobile applications for US based institutions. This team is responsible for developing the application Front/Back ends and deploying the app to apple/google store for mass adoption.

Researchers

A team of researchers with experiences spanning ML applications in Biology and Systematic Trading.

This team will be responsible for developing a structured protocol for efficient data processing, information retrieval, as well as the AI model architecture and training.

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

It is likely that to fully succeed in development we will need multiple rounds of funding to properly scale, however fund9 will be adequate in procuring a mvp which can be used to secure funding through other avenues such as VC, NIH, social funding, etc.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

Auditability will be measured per team through the following KPIs:

Research

• Flops (computational complexity of proposed Deep Learning Architectures)
• Accuracy improvements across a wide range of metrics captures in health research literature with the goal of outperforming traditional and widely used inference methodologies
• Recommendation improvements - Can we recommend actions to take to advance a studies goal more effectively, this will be measured using historical data available and by looking at the total time to complete a study objective. Simulated data will be used where no empirical data is available.
• Published research papers generated from our solutions.

Development

• Discretionary critique of User interface, overall usability, and adoption of SWE/Blockchain best practices and implementation of objectives outlined throughout this proposal.

Management

• Number of Institutions brought on
• Once launched: Number of daily active users, and data sharing frequencies
• Amount of additional external Funding raised

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

Creating a dapp platform that:

• Collects sensor -based, self inputted, and uploaded health data, 
• Gives hospitals and other EHR the ability to monetize siloed data while complying with HIPAA regulations 
• Train/deploy a health recommendation system for arbitrary, and specific, objectives initialized through user curated "studies" that utilizes the extensive data collections to understand complex health patterns that are difficult to decohere in present day clinical trials that do not allow tracking of individuals across studies, have siloed/small sampled sized studies, andor result in biased/error prone research 
• Allows universities, hospitals, corporations, and other research institutions the ability to bid for “study” data that would then get licensed with user permission for the use in product research and development of the bidding institution. 
• Recommend peer-to-peer consultations that pairs people based on genetic predispositions such that, for example, a user interested in losing weight can find someone with similar genetic traits, or other logged health data, that was once overweight and was able to successfully reach a healthy weight. 
• Enables users to track their progress in studies that they join/create and take data driven ownership over their own progress. 
• Distributes monies back to users based on their involvement in studies that got licensed.
• Provides health tracking and recommendations where applicable at accuracy rates for prediction greater than traditional statistical methodologies.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

No