Isaac: A Stellar-Powered Content Evaluation and Reward System

isaac

ISAAC

Isaac is a blockchain-backed reward platform for crowdsourcing user reviews and feedback for online articles. Based on the fast and innovative Stellar network, Isaac is an independent and unaffiliated evaluation system for any online content. The project was inspired by the growing need for impartial judgement of the wealth of online information to reveal biased sources and combat fake news. We aim to accomplish this by providing tools on the Isaac website and a browser-based extension that can be used to review articles, user-generated content, and public data by a set of fixed survey questions. Users earn Isaac tokens for rating the quality, objectivity, or usefulness of the online content. These survey responses are aggregated to provide consensus scores for judging the validity and trustworthiness of the reviewed content. Reward tokens may then be traded to view evaluations by other users and of any Isaac-supported online content.

Isaac is the expert friend you can trust for verified online content. We aim to provide a service that incentivizes the contribution of honest evaluations of online content and then utilizes these user evaluations to provide summarized ratings and rankings for articles, content creators, and websites.

collect data with our chrome extension

The Isaac extension is shown above interfacing the TradingView website to collect user reviews on stock predictions. The collected data are then automatically aggregated and analyzed to provide visual feedback on posted TradingView Ideas. Isaac users can view other reviews and the aggregated data by trading in Isaac tokens. Isaac Trend Data provides further enhancement of TradingView Ideas by providing statistical summaries of user comments and outcomes. Isaac applies advanced analytics to provide an easy way distinguish between valid and erroneous predictions.

visualize data with our chrome extension

Users can review content of scientific databases such as MoNA, Massbank of North America, by using either the browser extension or evaluation tool provided on the Isaac website. With the advent of large data analysis, reliable curation of scientific data is desperately needed. Citizen science platforms such as Zooniverse have successfully demonstrated that the volunteered participation of non-experts can yield tangible scientific results. The contributions of these volunteers require identification of patterns and anomalies that cannot be easily automated without substantial training data. Isaac expands on this foundation by seamlessly integrating into any open-access online resources and by providing Isaac tokens as a reward to scientific contributors

review data directly on the Isaac website

We have completed Phase One of our build plan. Below we describe the upcoming phases of Isaac development goals in detail:

Phase One (Completed, December 2017):

Prototype launch of the Isaac website and Google Chrome extension that supports evaluation of TradingView Ideas, scientific news articles from major news outlets, and mass spectral records provided by MassBank of North America
Validation of rewards payout method on the Stellar test network

Phase Two (In Progress, March 2018):

Expansion of supported websites for content review
Cross-browser support for Isaac extension
Optimization of abuse detection and bot deterrent strategies in large-scale tests
Development of an analytics dashboard to investigate gathered data and improve scoring and ranking systems
Register the Isaac Token on Moonbase

Phase Three, May 2018:

Release of White Paper
Launch of Isaac on the public Stellar network
Implement a discussion board open for suggestions of web content expansion and improvement of evaluation questions

The People behind Isaac:

The Isaac team has been formed from a tight knit group of friends who have been working together for several years in the field of scientific data analysis and software development. We received a lot of support from friends and contributors during the development of this project, who are mentioned on the main Isaac website.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Where can we find the Isaac website:

You can access the Isaac website at http://isaac.interational

When will Isaac launch on the test network:

Isaac will be launched, at the 15th of March to the public, on the test network. This is basically the public beta before we go live on the production network.

When will Isaac launch on the production network:

Isaac will be launched in May 2018 on the stellar production network, after the white paper is publicly released.

What can I do with Isaac tokens?:

In the beta stage, we intend for Isaac to be complete free for users. Once it becomes more established, we will establish a subscription-based model where users receive a certain number of free Isaac Trend Data per day but can spend Isaac tokens for full monthly access to the review data.

How can I find out more about Isaac:

We would love to talk to you using our public slack account and answer all your questions. You can find us at https://isaactoken.slack.com (Invite Link)

How can I install the Isaac extension:

The Isaac extension is in process of being registered in the chrome web store and will be freely available by March 15th.

isaac

Dear friends of Isaac

It's been now a week since we announced Isaac here and we thought it might be nice to provide a quick update. It has been an exciting week and we are in the final stages of deploying the extension to the chrome store.

In anticipation of it's release, we wrote our first official blog post about Isaac and it's utilization on TradingView.

You can find it here https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@berlinguyinca/benefits-of-isaac-as-review-tool-of-stock-market-predictions

We will be publishing further articles over the next couple of days!

BlockMaster

http://isaac.interational/ isn't working at the moment.

It seems like a good idea if you can prove that your reviews are accurate and get enough authors to want access. Finding people to do reviews shouldn't be as difficult if you can offer to exchange your token in the future.

It will be nice to checkout the demo.

isaac

BlockMaster hi, thank you for letting us know. This is due to us restructuring the infrastructure a bit and setting up new certificates. It should be back online tomorrow, when all is done.

We are not really concerned about finding enough people, since as you mentioned everybody likes tokens. To ensure the validity of reviews, we will utilize data mining and statistical methods. It will be challenging, but doable.

isaac

Hello, friends of Isaac,

it's been again a couple of days and we are getting closer to our submission to the stellar build challenge. For this would like to take this opportunity and direct you to the article, explaining how you can get your stellar account ready for the test launch of Isaac. You are able to find this at https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@berlinguyinca/trusting-the-isaac-token-using-the-stellar-laboratory

We are really excited to launch this platform and believe it will change the concept of reviews across the internet!

isaac

Hello again,

We are excited to announce that the Isaac extension is now available for free in the chrome store. To get started with it, please have a look at the following article describing it. https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@berlinguyinca/using-the-isaac-extension

Please be aware that we are currently running on the stellar test network!

StellarEconomy

I am sure you have heard of Steem https://steem.io/ if not check them out. Its a natural fit for Stellar to have something like this with Stellar Lumens. Hope this information supports your efforts.

Stellar Economy

isaac

StellarEconomy thank you, we are using steem for all our documentation of the Isaac based platform. But our product has a completely different focus than steem, since we see steem more as a news and blogging platform than an international review platform for any website driven content.

StellarEconomy

isaac I would think that it would be productive to know what type of content Stellar is interested in promoting and work around that angle. It is a natural fit for Stellar to use Lumens to pay for content like Steem is now doing. The idea that you have to hold onto your steem tokens vs selling right away is an important element.
It is interesting that there are things in the public domain like the internet and GPS vs Face book that is mostly owned by 1 person. It would be ideal if a new system could be built. I wish you the best on your project

ssmehta

StellarEconomy A Steem-like platform for Stellar does make a lot of sense, I agree. However, Isaac is less of a social networking/blogging service but instead focuses on collecting and analyzing reviews for existing content on the web. The flexibility of Isaac allows the platform to be applied to any type of content, but in the early stages we are focusing on a few key categories including news sources.

LukeSkywalker

StellarEconomy True that, net neutrality goes both ways, I feel more and more segregated on places like FB and blog posts are limiting more and more opportunities to comment. We need something that goes beyond Steemit though because i found that the incentives where actually ruining the authenticity of the authors for the sole purpose of making money....decentralized social media needs decentralized incentives if they are to combine assets with social media.

isaac

Just a quick update. Isaac is now live at http://isaac.international and we released the Isaac extension as opensource at https://github.com/berlinguyinca/isaacextension

Also the whitepaper is online as well!

isaac

LukeSkywalker Thanks for supporting our concept. Restricted communities and echo-chambers certainly are a problem, which is why we designed Isaac to serve as an independant feedback layer on top of existing resources. We also agree that any kind of incentivized system is prone to abuse, which is why we do not reward producers of online content and instead encourage many users to review existing content. This way, we can utilize statistical methods to identify outliers in the evaluations such as bots and users trying to manipulate Isaac ratings. We will continue to improve our content abuse detection algorithms to help support our community of users seeking to provide reliable content reviews and comments in a sea of fake news and bot commentators.

LukeSkywalker

isaac Adding the term "echo-chamber" to my vocabulary.

-Independant feedback layer on top of existing resources.
-Incentivized system is prone to abuse

Well looks like you can read my thoughts..I perfectly agree spot on.
Steemit killed the purpose, fun and authenticity of writing...how will you detect those groups of people that mutually,kissup to each other in an attempt to create hype? but Loved the concept absolutely. Anyone who feels the urgent duty to get involved in social activity to help shape the world and make it safer, better or to expose their art deserve incentives.

You need money because you want to write.
You dont write because you want money.

Also, How can one give an honest opinion about an article when they hope to get rich replying to them.
It was a revealing social experiment though.

could you use crowd voting to discredit fake social media? and like put an appeal button for discredited users that carry further credit penalties for "crying wolf" ie if you press the appeal button a moderator comes in to judge the situation because false positives exist and we need to prevent support request spam.

Do you also have AI to detect these? or maybe just regular text processing algorithms, keywords,sequences , correlations..

Man this is an interesting application field.

LukeSkywalker

I've got trade view's chat widget on my site, can I also interface /extend my product with Isaac for my socializing needs?

berlinguyinca

Dear @LukeSkywalker ,

thank you for your request and we most certainly would love for you to utilize the Isaac API and utilities. Could you maybe clarify your goals and needs to see how we could help?

kind regards,

Gert

LukeSkywalker

isaac users could have diminishing returns when they are flag. Using AI to analyze the relationship between commenters and writers in order to associate them into groups who stick together and mutually 'like' each others post. They will have high hit rates to a same person.

I will read the whitepaper and get back to you.

berlinguyinca I need to tap in to the cryptomarket user base.

If I integrated ISAAC users could blog about my project and fund litterature.
I would get visibility from users on ISAAC.

TidesNetwork

How does one be incentived to actually provide truth, rather than just going through the motions to receive a reward?

Also, where do these rewards come from? Is it a community funded pool?

isaac

@TidesNetwork Good question. For an individual evaluation, it is not possible to tell whether a user has provided an honest review. But we have developed methods for detecting abuse by considering how different a single user's reviews are from the consensus and also looking to see whether a user is biased towards or against a certain type of content. Dishonest users can have their payout docked by some penalty factor or may be banned from receiving rewards outright. The reviews collected during the beta period will help us to refine these abuse detection methods and develop new approaches.

A fixed number of ISAAC tokens were pre-generated and from this a daily pool is allocated for payouts of rewards.
The white paper goes into detail about the definition of the pool and the payout algorithm/limits. During the beta stage, this is all running on the Stellar test network.

berlinguyinca

LukeSkywalker how do you feel about continuing this conversation in our slack or over email so we can dive in a bit and talk more about details .

you can reach us at info@isaactoken.com