Using distributed ledger technology to democratize neural network training

Artificial Intelligence has regained research interest, primarily because of big data. Internet expansion, social networks and online sensors led to the generation of an enormous amount of information daily. This unprecedented data availability boosted Machine Learning. A research area that has greatly benefited from this fact is Deep Neural Networks. Nowadays many use cases require huge models with millions of parameters and big data are proven to be essential to their proper training. The scientific community has proposed several methods to generate more accurate models. Usually, these methods need high performance infrastructure, which limits their applicability to large organizations and institutions that have the required funds. Another source of concern is privacy; anyone using the leased processing power of a remote data center, must trust another entity with their data. Unfortunately, in many cases sensitive data were leaked, either for financial exploitation or due to security issues. However, there is a lack of research studies when it comes to open communities of individuals with commodity hardware, who wish to join forces in a way that is non-binding and without the need for a central authority. Our work on LEARNAE attempts to fill this gap, by creating a way of providing training in Artificial Neural Networks, featuring decentralization, data ownership and fault tolerance. This article adds some important pieces to the puzzle: It studies the resilience of LEARNAE when dealing with network disruptions and proposes a novel way of embedding low-energy sensors that reside in the Internet of Things domain, retaining at the same time the established distributed philosophy.