HUMAN Protocol is an infrastructure that aims to redefine how humans work by supporting distributed job markets.
The Protocol provides tools for labor requesters to crowdsource people to perform tasks that help bolster machine-learning networks.
HUMAN’s vision is to create a more human world: decentralized yet connected, with every viewpoint and background accounted for and represented, in which all value produced is rewarded. The Protocol facilitates direct, globally-mapped connections that bring workers closer to the rewards of their work, organizations to workforces, and machines to understanding.
Distributed Job Markets
To improve a digital world, we must look to its foundations: the mechanisms and systems through which people connect, interact, and collaborate.
HUMAN enables distributed job markets, but it is not the job market itself. Rather, it provides the tools, infrastructure, plugins, and APIs to support broad-scale data markets – which in time, will become markets to support any type of work.
It connects distributed workers with global opportunities to empower an already flourishing gig economy. This ensures it is the workers, not corporate authorities, that have control over the opportunities available to them, allowing the workers to receive more value for their contributions.
AI training
New technologies require new data. Data informs the capability of machines to accurately interpret the world.
If organizations can select who labels data, they can better assure the relevancy of the dataset produced. HUMAN Protocol provides the end-to-end infrastructure – the tools, plugins, integrations, and API – to hire, manage, validate, and compensate workers at any scale.
How Does It Work?
Three key entities within HUMAN Protocol are Requesters, Workers, and Exchanges.
The Requester submits work to the Exchange with a bounty attached to a smart contract. The bounty is a sum of Human Tokens (HMT) held in escrow until the Worker fulfils the specifications of the job.
The Workers perform the work as specified by the Requester. A Worker can be an individual, a website, or derive from labor pools.
The Exchange is the interface between Requesters and Workers. It monitors the blockchain for new jobs, manages bids for work, and serves the jobs to Workers.
The Technology
The Protocol enables Requesters of work to choose from job types supported by Exchanges, then create a job specification and set of tasks to complete. This is distributed by the Exchange to Workers.
Optimized execution of jobs by Exchanges is also possible. In this process, the Exchange can intelligently split jobs into smaller pieces. For example, when a Requester submits a medical document for labelling to a HUMAN Exchange, the Exchange can factor this into multiple sub-tasks: understanding where fields are on a page, what type of field each is, and what the contents of the field contain. Each sub-task can be represented by a standard job type.
The Exchange then distributes these sub-tasks to other Exchanges that support those job types, which make sure that each part reaches an appropriate worker, whether human or machine or both. For example, complicated medical terminology may need to go to an Exchange with qualified doctors. Simple tasks may have no such constraints.
As Workers submit their individual answers, the Exchange submits results to a Recording Oracle, which does an initial evaluation and aggregates the work into chunks. These chunks are then evaluated by a Reputation Oracle, which performs payouts and computes a final result for the Requester.
hCaptcha: The Anti-Bot Solution
The first application running on HUMAN Protocol is hCaptcha, an online security service that distinguishes humans from bots via simple questions, e.g. selecting all image squares containing a dog.
hCaptcha uses HUMAN Labs’s Proof-of-HUMANity tool to assist in the evaluation and compensation of the end users who get paid to solve the image-annotation challenges.
“Proof-of-HUMANity is a gamechanger for the blockchain industry, which has long been plagued by nefarious bot activity,” Alex Newman, hCaptcha co-founder, said in a statement.
With the boom in decentralized finance (DeFi), front-running bots have increasingly become an issue. The bots are known to cut in line in an execution queue, right before a known future transaction occurs, in order to capitalize on a price change.
By using hCaptcha, developers can ensure transactions on their networks are executed by humans, and this bot-buster is a more private alternative to Google’s reCAPTCHA. hCaptcha does not sell personal data and they collect only minimum necessary personal data. They are transparent in describing the information being collected, how the information will be used and/or disclosed, and they agree to only use such data to provide the hCaptcha service to Cloudflare.
Partnerships and Integrations with Chainlink, Solana and Polkadot
HUMAN Protocol has teamed up with Metamask and Chainlink to create on-chain proof-of-humanity, enabling ERC20 contract developers to verify that the actions in a smart contract are made by a human.
Chainlink will be used to launch decentralized Reputation Oracles for HUMAN Protocol. These Chainlink-powered Reputation Oracles will enable the autonomous distribution of tasks and payments for HUMAN-powered work pools across the Ethereum, Polkadot, and Solana blockchains. HUMAN Protocol also plans to use Chainlink Price Feeds for payment exchange rates.
Solana was selected by HUMAN Protocol Foundation as one of the leading choices to integrate with HUMAN Protocol. The integration is currently underway, with plans to launch new labor pools later this year.
Polkadot functions as the middle layer that translates the information between the different chains HUMAN Protocol is operating on. Parity and MoonBeam have been implemented.
HMT Token
HMT is the native token of HUMAN Protocol. It is the primary mechanism of value transfer within the network.
Because HUMAN Protocol is built on the blockchain, it can apply smart contracts to execute high-volume micropayments across the globe. The openly verifiable smart contracts hold all funds in escrow, so there is peace of mind for all parties involved.
The Requester spends HMT as they create a Smart Bounty for a job. The Requester prefunds the bounty, which is stored in escrow by smart contracts.
Workers earn HMT by completing work. They bid for work in HMT and are compensated for their work in HMT. If the job is complete, the prefunded bounty is released to the Worker. If the work does not fulfil the requirements, the job is aborted, and funds are returned to the Requester.
The Exchanges earn HMT for matching requested work with Workers. The Exchanges prioritise distribution of tasks based on the reputation, which is determined both by the quantity of HMT a Worker holds or has previously earned (Proof-of-Balance), taking into account both the total value of their past transactions as well as their balance.
The supply of the HMT token is fixed.
Human-Machine Collaboration
Today, HUMAN Protocol already offers unprecedented artificial intelligence training capabilities.
hCaptcha is interacted with by 15% of internet users, representing the world’s largest data-labeling workforce. This is only the beginning, however.
HUMAN and its partners are working to bring the Protocol to more applications, each functioning as an Exchange between Requesters and Workers, to realize new distributed markets and ways of working, and increase the points of human-to-machine interaction.
Not only does HUMAN offer access to the world’s largest labor pool, and the means to effectively manage such a distributed workforce, but it is enabling systems to revolutionize human-machine interaction within AI: a mechanism for machines themselves to understand the data they need to improve their algorithms, and to have a means of asking for that data across an automated, global marketplace, where the answers can be provided.
FAQ
HUMAN Protocol is a broadly applicable technology to connect and validate human and machine workers.
HUMAN is focused on creating the largest labor pool for humans to achieve greater potential, and machines to achieve greater understanding. They offer the ability to request work from other machines; repetitive tasks can be taken care of, and human workers can focus on more interesting, creative, or specialized tasks.
HUMAN Protocol creates a blockchain based, two-sided marketplace. On one side, it enables requests to label large volumes of data. On the other, it allows for the workers who complete this work to be evaluated and remunerated.
Yes, the most widely used service by HUMAN Protocol is hCaptcha, a tool to distinguish humans from bots. HUMAN has also partnered with multiple networks to make their technology available on a global scale.
Sources:
Click to access 60511d72db8c7eb0b9799526_Human-litepaper.pdf
https://www.coindesk.com/human-protocol-expands-hcaptcha-tool-launches-wallet-to-make-ai-smarter
https://news.bitcoin.com/introducing-human-protocol-a-new-way-for-humans-and-machines-to-securely-connect-and-collaborate/
https://www.humanprotocol.org/blog/introduction-to-the-human-token-hmt?lng=en-US
https://www.humanprotocol.org/blog/development-update-collaborations-and-integrations?lng=en-US
https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptcha/
