The Heritage open source project developed by A³ by Airbus will allow non-profits and charitable

organisations to accept donations in crypto currency.

A block chain technology developed by A³ by Airbus will open a new donor class for charities around the
world, creating valuable revenue streams for organisations currently unable to benefit from crypto
currency exchanges due to resource or knowledge gaps.

Block chain is still a young market. While innovation and discovery take their course, Airbus drives
projects that deliver a working product and share an alignment on the necessity for decentralised, public
block chains.

Digital ledger for fundraising

Heritage is an open source project on the ethereum block chain, which functions as a “digital ledger” for
charitable organisations to record and validate donations made to them, using crypto currencies such as
Bitcoin. It is employed by the Airbus Foundation for the benefit of Humanitarian Challenge fundraising
campaigns, including a celebration of its own 10-year anniversary.

By making Heritage an open source project, the Airbus Foundation will help countless charities
introduce crypto currency and “smart contract” technologies into their fundraising operations – with
hopes to set a standard that non-profits can replicate to continue to grow the ecosystem, while also
supporting an underserved market.

Unboxing crypto currency

So how does it work? When donors make a donation through Heritage, their contribution is recorded
along with the donor’s unique ethereum address and donation amount. Heritage also can record and
issue a donation certificate information (which is required to file taxable deductions). This information is
released as a freely exchangeable asset and allows donors to easily build a portfolio of their donations.

The Heritage block chain technology offers many advantages to the charitable market, including an
improved workflow and efficiency; increased accountability to donors due to the network’s public
nature; and access to the new digital donor class without significant technological investment of their
own.
Fundraising and donations is the first use case for the Heritage platform, with A-Cubed seeking to
implement the same technology for its internal business applications.A-Cubed, the Silicon Valley outpost
of Airbus, has launched an open source, public blockchain project aiming to assist charities and non-
profits that are onboarding cryptocurrencies and smart contracts.Blockchain has the potential to rewrite
the economy and change the balance of power across industries. It also has specific uses for the
enterprise.The Airbus Foundation, the European aerospace giant's philanthropic play, is the first to use
the Ethereum-based blockchain technology developed by Heritage.

According to A-Cubed, Heritage will provide Airbus Foundation with a decentralised application to
accept and manage cryptocurrency donations for itself and its partners.

"Many of the organisations that could benefit most from blockchain are denied access due to resource
skill or knowledge gaps. Heritage wants to open these organisations up to a new class of donor," A-
Cubed explained.

With its blockchain play, the company hopes to set a standard that non-profits can replicate to
"continue to grow the ecosystem".
Artificial intelligence (AI) is much more than a research field: it is a ubiquitous future technology with the
potential to redefine all areas of our society. At Airbus, we believe AI is a key competitive advantage that
enables us to capitalise on the value of our data.

Shaping our business through artificial intelligence

Airbus focuses on six technical areas relating to AI that will shape our business over the next five years:

Knowledge extraction: Extracting value from unstructured documents

Computer vision: Transforming images and video into objects and activities based on deep-learning
detection and decision-making

Anomaly detection: Finding hidden patterns in data

Conversational assistance: Designing natural language-interaction systems

Decision-making: Optimising solutions for very complex constrained problems

Autonomous flight: Enabling the next generation of aerial vehicles with new capabilities

Airbus AIGym – an online platform that proposes Airbus-specific challenges to be solved with artificial
intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) – is launching its third challenge. This latest cycle seeks to
identify new and unexpected changes in the behaviour of monitored systems, as well as analyse
suspicious behaviour for potential faults and failures more efficiently and more quickly.

The challenge’s goal is to search for top players in the field of anomaly detection in time series as well as
to encourage the research community to tackle the issues related to data generated by the aerospace
industry during operations and tests. The contest is based on three datasets coming from cases in the
helicopter, satellite and commercial aircraft business domains.

Registration will remain open until year-end, with the challenge’s official kick-off set for the first quarter
of 2019 with a first training phase. The second phase will be a shorter evaluation in the second quarter,
followed by a restitution workshop organised in June 2019 that will complete the challenge.
Artificial intelligence is becoming ubiquitous – with a presence across industries and technologies,
machine intelligence facilitates work processes by reducing costs and boosting efficiency while
augmenting employees’ work. It supplements human expertise, skills and knowledge – as well as
improves decision making and reduces cognitive workload as a result.

Airbus is at the forefront in the development of AI technologies and solutions in the aerospace industry.
For Airbus, artificial intelligence is not a niche technology – rather one that has the potential to affect
and redefine all areas of the company’s business. Machine intelligence is no longer an exciting futuristic
theory – it has applications at Airbus today and can be incorporated within existing and emerging Airbus
digital products.

A new partnership between ANSYS and Airbus Defense and Space will develop a new artificial
intelligence design tool to create the embedded flight control software for Europe’s Future Combat Air
System (FCAS).

FCAS is a next-generation air combat development program involving France, Germany and now Spain
to develop a system of fully automated remote air platforms and sixth-generation fighters that will
replace the current generation of Eurofighter and Rafale jets operated by those three countries.
Dassault and Airbus are the lead prime manufacturers for the FCAS program.

In manufacturing an aircraft, numerous production difficulties can occur. In the short term, Airbus has
utilized machine learning on the production floor to mitigate this. In the development of their newest
A350 model, Airbus wanted to move faster without compromising on quality[7]. To meet the goal of
faster production, Airbus began a data collection process that documented all the issues and actions
that took place on the shop floor. The system generated recommendations to suggest the best course of
action, should a problem arise. In the longer term, Airbus is hoping to more fully automate the
manufacturing process with more machines and less people, further enabling higher production[8].

Airbus is also using their huge amounts of data to help provide insights and predictive analytics to
airlines. In 2017, Airbus launched Skywise, an open data platform that assists airlines with flight
operations analysis, predictive maintenance, and troubleshooting on an ongoing basis. Airbus uses
onboard sensor data to provide this information (Airbus’ A350 model has 250,000 sensors aboard and
can measure 900,000 system parameters). They will continue to sign more airlines to this platform, and
in the longer term, make this solution available for helicopters, military aircraft, and other products.

One area of AI less explored by Airbus is the notion of “self-flying planes.” While a large part of aircraft
operations is automated, the pilot remains an indispensable part of the journey. However, it is most
likely safer to be in a plane not subject to human error. I recommend that Airbus explore this possibility
and invest in making this a reality. Indeed, the use cases for machine learning are infinite, not only in
commercial flight, but in the defense and military sectors as well. It is in the company’s best interest to
invest in machine learning startups and talent that can help dream up solutions for problems Airbus has
not even begun to identify.