WHITEPAPER

White Paper

INVOICE FINANCE ON THE BLOCKCHAIN

By Steve Nico Williams
Populous

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT 3

INTRODUCTION 4

THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE 5

INCREASING EDUCATION 6

TECHNOLOGY 8

1. OVERVIEW 8

2. MACHINE LEARNING 8

2.1 CHAT WINDOW 9

2.2 NOTEPAD AGGLUTINATION 10

SMART CONTRACTS 12

INDUSTRY TREND 13

CONCLUSION 14

REFERENCES 15

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 ABSTRACT

Taking notes today is a lonely process with little access to resources and tools in the fast-
paced classroom environment. While classes have become increasingly material-heavy, the
student has been left with the traditional tools, a word document and a keyboard. Although
Peer-To-Peer (P2P) note-taking platforms such as Google Docs and Microsoft Word Online
have sprung up, they create disorganized notes when produced by teams of people. These
notes usually serve one purpose and afterwards, are discarded when they could be of use
to others. Similar to sharing physical hard notes, these note-taking platforms provide
students with a convenient means of sharing knowledge with each other. However, as the
number of students who use such note-taking platforms increases, so does the number of
documents being discarded. The total market size for online notes multiplies every year as
the number of MOOCs (massive open online course), online schools, and schools grows
worldwide. Today, there is estimated to be 1.4 billion students in primary and secondary
education and an additional 210 million in higher education (more than doubled since
2000). Utilizing the notes of students in previous semesters can prevent students from
repeating popular mistakes seen every year. Paying attention to ones own learning
experience is insufficient in todays fast-paced world. Instead, students should leverage
contributions from their current classmates and previous students. Collanote introduces a
collaborative note-taking platform built using convolutional neural networks to assign
points to students in proportion to their contribution to a classs notes. Students who
contribute quicker and more often attain higher points. Their notes will be consolidated
into a master notepad which will then be stored on the Ethereum blockchain. Any student
who desires to access those notes will exchange CLN tokens for access to the notes. The
CLN reward will be distributed to users in proportion to their contribution to the desired
notes.

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 INTRODUCTION

Learning is a collaborative effort not only between students and professors, but between
students themselves. Most learning or teaching tools focus only on the relationship
between the student and the professor and ignore the most didactic part of the equation:
the student to student relationship. In order to maximize a students learning potential, this
crucial part cannot and should not be ignored.

During lectures, most students take the same set of notes, misunderstand lectures in the
process of note-taking, are intimidated at the thought of asking for clarifications, and must
go to office hours where faculty must explain the material to each student individually. This
inefficiency leads to long hours of work, and places a burden on faculty, students, and the
school. Collaborative note-taking makes the lecture less about parroting the blackboard
and more about understanding the material displayed.

Sometimes, especially in rigorous math courses where definitions are both immensely
important and extremely lengthy and precise, misunderstandings stem from
misremembering specific information from much earlier in the semester. These minutia
have real impacts on proofs, exercises, and conceptual understanding, but searching ones
notes for the information in the middle of a lecture can do more harm than good. Collanote,
with its AI-powered question-and-answer service, can retrieve the answers with little
ceremony, allowing one to focus entirely on the lecture.

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 THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE

Collanote functions as the central hub for note-taking in each class. Each student logs into
Collanote with their email and password, and gains access to both a synchronized notepad
and a chat window. From this point, the user will be able to immediately interact with
classmates, take notes and ask questions in real time. All updates to the notepad are saved
incrementally, so nothing is ever lost, and users may time-travel through each revision and
see exactly what the notes looked like at any point in time. These notes are stored on the
server, so lost notebooks, hard drive failures, and accidental file deletion are no longer an
impedance to learning.

Meanwhile, Collanote works in the background to seamlessly delete duplicate information,

remove inappropriate remarks, automatically answer questions about the notes, and
assist with extracting the review topics and overarching concepts from the notes.
Furthermore, Collanotes backend may explicitly be invoked in the chat window to
provide any of its automatic services. Questions which remain unanswered by AI or
students may automatically notify the professor for clarification, and the professor has full
access to the notepad to see exactly what students took away from each lecture, which
nearly eliminates the need for surveys to gauge topic comprehension.

According to user feedback, large classes may be better served by multiple smaller
notepads, which are automatically merged into a master version of the notes through
Collanotes topic extraction, semantic role extraction, and heuristic algorithms. Much of the
groundwork to deliver such a feature has already been laid, and this will be in place at the
launch of the MVP. Students may enter and leave all notepads associated with their class as
they wish, so each person may take notes with their friends and colleagues, as part of a
larger group, or alone, if they choose to do so, while still benefiting from Collanotes rich
feature set and robust backup and synchronization capabilities.

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 INCREASING EDUCATION

Our world is innovating towards a place requiring higher and new skillsets from its people.
In the 1970s, only ~10% or below of the people achieved a college degree in todays three
most populous countries, China, India, and the United States. Today, those countries
percentages are 8%,9%,and 26% respectfully, representing an average increase of 287%.

Top three most populous countries in 2017

The percentage of higher education achievers is not limited to the top three most populous
countries. The trend is universal across the rest of the world and all levels of education.
Similar school-attending population increases are seen in primary and secondary
education. From a statistical standpoint, lower levels of education must see higher
proportions of populations attend schools if they are to provide the number of students for
higher education and training required in a skilled workforce.

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 Top ten most populous countries in 2010

According to the most recent report by the International Institute for Applied Systems
Analysis, over 10% of the people in many countries will attain some form of higher
education degree by the year 2030. As more students learn together than ever before, they
will necessitate integrative tools through specialized platforms to document their notes,
collaborate internationally, and avoid repetition of error. Current inefficiencies will only be
multiplied in the future as the world transitions into demanding a more skilled education-
dependent workforce to operate.

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 TECHNOLOGY

1. OVERVIEW
Collanotes technology stack is heavily based on Node, which allows it to run on a large
variety of platforms and databases. The client is a Javascript application which runs in any
modern browser, and has potential to be ported to the desktop and mobile devices in the
future. Collanotes web interface communicates with the server via a websocket to allow
lightweight, real-time collaboration between users on notepads. Most features outside of
the core functionality are implemented as plugins to the server, allowing for deep
customization.

The modular architecture of Collanote makes it incredibly resilient to heavy use. According
to internal testing, Collanote can handle around 1,000 concurrent users per pad before
showing signs of latency on the client, and we were unable to create a situation in which
the server showed signs of overloading. Because Collanote can accommodate more users in
the same notepad than most classes, we are confident that the application can scale
reliably. The applications user identification and authentication methods can easily
integrate with schools login systems. Deployment on a large universitys web servers such
as Penn State may be done with as few as two commands, and Collanote works with nearly
any software stack.

Individual notepads may also be easily embedded into any web page, such as a Canvas
class page, to provide a myriad of features. Implementations include scratchpad,
brainstorming area, or collaborative writing and drawing space. Read-only copies of
notepads may also be embedded in a similar fashion. With read-only pads, master copies of
class notes, group exercises from lectures, and other final documents may also be
embedded in any webpage, preventing accidental editing and allowing notepads to easily
and safely be displayed anywhere even on the open internet.

2. MACHINE LEARNING

Collanote primarily uses two forms of machine learning to assist students during time-
critical notetaking.

These technologies are:

1. Rank and retrieve for chat window questions

2. Natural language understanding for notepad agglutination.

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2.1 CHAT WINDOW

Students who have questions want to receive prompt answers especially in a learning
environment that is methodical. Misunderstanding one step in a procedure can barricade
students understanding of the rest of the lecture. If one step is misunderstood, students
may forfeit their attention in frustration.

To quell students questions, a chat window is provided within the notepad itself. Once
students have questions, they may query the chat window for answers. Relevant answers
will be provided with rank and retrieve utilizing Apache Solr.

Rank and Retrieve is a retrieval technique that find answers within stored documents that
are highly relevant to the search query (question) and displays results to the student based
on a relevancy ranking component. Apache Solr is an opensource project written in Java
that provides real-time indexing, full-text search, and rich document handling. Students
will be provided answers to relevant questions through Apache Solrs enterprise search
engine.

As new students take the same courses year after year, they will generally ask the same
questions. Apache Solr will optimize for the most relevant questions and calibrate its
search algorithm to provide faster, more precise, and accurate answers. New students
learning will accelerate and classes will become more efficient.

2.2 NOTEPAD AGGLUTINATION

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INTRODUCTION:
Once a lecture is finalized, every students notes will agglutinate into one master file. Most
students are not able to create perfect notes and will benefit from being able to compare
their interpretation of the lecture to that of others through the master notes.

Collanote will generate master notes through natural language processing by using
Gensims LDA and the Python library scikit-learn (sklearn). CoreNLP will then be used as
an external check and for calibrating machine-learning parameters.

TERMS:

Gensim is a vector space and topic modeling toolkit built for python. It will extract note
topics from multiple documents to provide document similarity scores.

Sklearn is a python library that compliments Gensim for classification, clustering, and
necessary pre-processing for machine learning.

CoreNLP is am opensource grammatical analysis tool built by Stanford for natural language
processing.

ANALYSIS:

Natural language understanding will determine the master notepad content provided
through Gensim, Sklearn, and CoreNLP. The key words from every line on every students
notepad will be extracted and inserted into a key term array. A closest pair algorithm will
assign a score to every line based on the distance between certain keywords. This score
will provide the foundation for establishing an average Levenshtein distance score for lines
with similar closest pair scores for shared key terms, regardless of who owns the notepad.
Those lines within a certain variance determined by the average Levenshtein distance
score will be assumed to be duplicate.

To ensure that no duplicate lines exist in the master notepad, a deduplication process will
delete multiple instances of the same notes and then assign one representative line into the
master notepad.

The Levenshtein distance string metric will offer real-time recommendations about missed
notes to students as they take notes on topics assigned Levenshtein distance scores from
previous years classes. This will strengthen the students learning process by correcting
errors at the point of mistake and reduce the effort required to reverse incorrect learning.

Students who have finished taking notes for a lecture will subsequently receive access to
two sets of notes. One will be a document of their personal notes exclusively accessible by
the creator and the other will be a master notepad file that the entire class can access.

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[Diagram of algorithm and points assignment goes here]

SMART CONTRACTS

Smart contracts are self-executing contracts built on code which lay on the Ethereum
Blockchain. They are processed through the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The smart
contract advantages are that in efficient transactions, reduction of manual error, and
compatibility with micro-transactions.
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Collanote will leverage smart contracts by dispersing CLN tokens to notepad creators in
exchange for notes to whomever may desire to purchase those creators notepad.

Every notepad stored on the blockchain will carry an associated smart contract. The smart
contract locks the intellectual property of the notepad which can only be unlocked by
potential buyers who pay in CLN. The CLN for the notepad will be distributed to initial
notepad creators in proportion to their contribution to the notepad. If Alices work makes
up 60% of the notepad, Ayushs work makes up 30%, and Jacks makes up 10%, then Alice
will receive 60% of CLN, Ayush will receive 30% of CLN, and Jack will receive 10% of CLN.

The blockchains ability to store notes provides students a great incentive to take notes.
Whereby note-taking was dominated by the most swarming, front-of-the-class, attentive
and devoted students before, many more students will want to take notes with Collanote in
order to profit indefinitely off of rewards locked in smart contracts. Collanote provides
students an avenue to generate profit while learning at the same time. Those students who
do not take notes will still be able to access the master notes, but will receive no future
rewards for lack of contribution to master notepads.

The free rider problem in note-taking is that lazy students take advantage of the hard-
working by siphoning notes from the most connected students. Collanote will reduce the
middlemen, the connected students, from taking advantage of and selling the hard-
working students work. Collanote will allow the creators of notepads to sell their work
directly to willing beneficiaries in the class. After the class is over, the smart contracts sit in
anticipation for future students willing to access their predecessors notes by spending
CLN.

Collanote provides a convenient platform for which smart contracts can release notes into
because students will already be taking their own notes on it. Collanote will allow students
to have an all-in-one platform for notes past and present. No longer will students have to
conglomerate notes sent by email, written on paper, spread through web chats, or
downloaded as pdfs from the web. Notes will no longer be as disorganized or as likely to be
lost.

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 INDUSTRY TREND

The current industry of online note-taking is centered upon students uploading notes taken
on their own. Online applications such as Oneclass, Nexusnotes, and Coursehero rely on
user-generated content to supply a database of easily accessible notes for specific course
offerings. These platforms reward those users who upload notes with valuable credits or
commissions for set of notes.

Coursehero is a prominent note service used by over 4,300 universities around the world.
Students who access notes online can choose to upload 10 documents for unlock credits to
5 documents. Greater note access can be bought through a monthly subscription of
$39.95/month.

A monthly subscription prevents note access because it requires students to overpay for
notes when they only want to access one note at a time. In the hectic school environment,
students are unable to effectively predict whether they will require access to 1 or 100 notes
in the next month.

A pay per view payment system solves the bulk buying problem by allowing students to
pay only for the notes they want to see. Students will no longer have to pay hefty monthly
fees such as $39.95 for desired access to only a couple of notes.

Collanote simplifies the process of supplying notes to the platform. Students who wish to
supply notes to the platform do not have to upload or convert documents on their own.
Collanotes built in and user-friendly notepad allows students to seamlessly provide notes
to the platform as they take them. This allows Collanote to easily allow students to be paid
for their notes on a case-by-case rather than a bulk method. Whereas the note creators
make no money for the content they generate on Coursehero, they will be instantly paid for
their notes on Collanote once another student deems them useful. Collanote does not
collect monthly subscription fees like Coursehero and will allow direct payments to
creators.

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 Conclusion

Recently, it has become apparent that content creation can be rewarded on the blockchain,
regardless of the creator. By enabling users to seamlessly generate notes on the fly, and
coupling that content with modern machine learning techniques, notes can be optimized
for future users. Traditional note-takers will soon follow Collanote users who are reaping
profits for a behavior they would be doing otherwise, for free. Collanote automates the
process of note creation for future users who may also place value on notes that have been
taken many times before.

Current note providers such as Coursehero and Classnotes do not leverage the use of a
notepad generating platform that can grant profits to suppliers. A student may provide
thousands of notes and be merely paid in unlock credits (for accessing other notes), when
they could be generating real profit in the form of CLN tokens which will be exchangeable
for fiat at exchanges.

By taking notes on Collanote, students can leverage the use of a note-taking platform
connected to the rest of their class. They can have a means of receiving answers to
questions right when they need it most, at the time of note-taking. Once they are done
taking notes, students will have ownership of notes that will generate them revenue for the
rest of their lives.

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 REFERENCES

1. http://data.uis.unesco.org/

2. https://qz.com/965664/the-number-of-students-globally-has-doubled-since-
2000-and-its-private-colleges-that-are-meeting-the-demand/

3. https://ourworldindata.org/higher-education/

4. http://opennlp.apache.org/

5. http://scikit-learn.org/stable/

6. https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/

7. http://oftechandlearning.com/taking-notes-laptops-vs-handwriting/

8. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/224228

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