AI and blockchain assists with smart parking

 Parking tends to be an issue with most medium and large-sized cities. With real estate being finite, the developers tend to build revenue-generating structures (e.g. apartment or office buildings, or malls). These generally generate much more revenue than a simple parking lot. The owner-occupied properties tend to minimize the parking area, as it removes potential office space for their workers. With these limitations, it is easy to understand how parking has become an issue. Computer systems are able to make our lives easier, and this is no different. To resolve this issue, two companies in different fields came together. Fetch.ai and Datarella, in AI and blockchains, were the partners. Their project, being tested in Munich, used AI to optimize parking. This ties nicely into the smart city concept. the program helps to move vehicles to the optimal spots, removing the waste of time and resources (e.g. gas). This also has the extra benefit to the other drivers of removing cars driving when they wouldn't need to, easing congestion. Blockchain comes into play as this is a decentralized network. The decentralized network works to split complex tasks within the network. This is only the first step. The companies are planning other projects to continue the application.

Blockchain's application with agri-food

 The world's population continues to grow at an astounding rate year after year. Every person on the planet needs to eat and consume yet more resources. One area this has particularly affected and stretched resources have been the agri-food business. There is a limited amount of land to grow all the food we need, across the globe, consumed every day of the year. While this problem isn't going away and is only getting worse, there is assistance available. One area this may assist with is improving the digitization of the supply chain. Granted a portion of this is done through the legacy accounting systems. By bringing in blockchain, there will be a greater level of transparency with the products. Anyone along with the supply chain and others may track the product, and know where the food originated, as well as the processing points. As a tangent with the data on the blockchain, the potential for fraud with the food's data is minimized. 

Blockchain; it's not just for medical systems

 In recent years, there has been an abundance of research done by applying blockchain to the civilian medicine market. This could be in the back-end or administrative functions with orders, supply chain, and other functions. This has also been applied to medical record systems with recording updates to the patient records. These functions provide, among other benefits, immutability. Once the records and updates are entered into systems, and subsequently into the blocks, these cannot be changed. Someone can't later simply attempt to open a block and change a dosage or other information when it is convenient. As this has been shown to be a viable tool for this use case. A related use is with the military health field. These industries have a commonality with patient records and confidential. Both require patient records to be recorded and not be able to be changed, along with confidentiality. Blockchain provides for this with each block and the encryption each block has. Bruce Doll, Assistant Vice President fo Technology Research and Innovation at the Department of Defenses's Uniformed Services University is focussedon prioritizing blockchain research. In addition, to ensure the data is indeed correct, AI and ML should be leveraged. Other viable uses for this within the military health system include COVID-19 vaccine distribution, credentialing health providers, and many other use cases.