Onai

Onai is an artificial intelligence, blockchain, and cryptocurrency company that has developed artificial intelligence and analytics in contracts with DARPA and NASA. This includes the development of protocols intended to facilitate distributed computation through blockchain. The company's service includes the use of distributed computing for applications from simulation to cybersecurity to video understanding.

Onai's products span different computational disciplines. This has included the development of a variety of technologies for decentralized deep learning and natural language processing, with a specific interest for NLP on an analysis of web content in all languages. Onai has also worked on deep learning methods that are privacy preserving and offer the benefits of artificial intelligence without the exposure of sensitive data.

Onai has also worked to develop new blockchain protocols and protocols to use blockchain for increased distributed computing and continued collaboration. And distributed computing enables efficient scaling of workloads and allows parties to collaborate with minimal or no setup required.

Onai works in cryptography in order to enable greater data innovation while reducing the risks of data exposure and facilitating greater interoperability and collaboration. Secure multiparty computation can enable parties (each of which is holding sensitive data) collaborate to compute a joint result, and is intended to be done without requiring any party to expose data to the others. Onai has used homomorphic encryption to enable the performance of computations on encrypted data without knowing the encrypted data. And the company has a focus and emphasis on code correctness in their technologies in order to reduce or remove the potential for bugs, which have often resulted in either loss of finances or exposure of data in cryptocurrency protocols and databases among others.

Using the technology the company develops, it has worked on solutions based on machine learning and data analytics, cryptocurrency and blockchain, and distributed computing. This includes use of the company's Coronai solution, which is a public decentralized computing system. As well, this includes solutions for government through the projects in the SBIR/STTR program where Onai has worked with government agencies including DARPA, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. These projects have included developing frameworks for parallel/distributed computing and artificial intelligence. Onai has also worked to develop specific hardware that is capable of integrating the company's AI, blockchain, and cryptographic technologies.

In healthcare, Onai's technology has been used for the advancement of research and quality of care. This has included the use of secure forms of collaboration that offer a decentralized data-drive healthcare system, which does not expose the patients sensitive data. This could allow secure inference, allowing for a greater quality of care, without data exposure, but still allowing for the querying of that secured and private data. And this has seen Onai develop software that allows researchers to train AI models across institutions, which allows for multiparty computation but without data being shared openly.

In 2020, Onai initiated an initiative that applied the company's blockchain and cryptographic techniques to the COVID-19 pandemic. Called the RECovER initiative, this allowed COVID-19 records across institutions to be queried by researchers without information being leaked from an institution's data, yet allowing those researchers to engage with the data.