Toward Blockchain for Intelligent Systems

The artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain (BC) are obviously two promising research topics that will no doubt open up many business opportunities. Although there exists essential difference between AI and BC, some recent studies have attempted to put them into a single information system. Such integrations, of course, can be either AI for BC or BC for AI based integrated systems. However, putting these two distinctive technologies directly into a single system might not create integrating synergistic effects because several AI technologies were originally designed for centralized computing environment while BC technologies were designed for distributed computing environment. This article begins with a brief review of AI and BC technologies. A distributed AI framework based on BC technologies is then presented to provide an integrated solution to combine these two critical technologies. Finally, several important open issues and possible research directions of BC for intelligent systems will then be given to depict the future of these two technologies.