IBM reveals its top five innovation predictions for the next five years
IBM reveals its top five innovation predictions for the next five years
IBM
IBM director of education transformation Chalapathy Neti.
IBM
Bernie Meyerson, the vice president of innovation at IBM.
The IBM “5 in 5″ is the eighth year in a row that IBM has made
predictions about technology, and this year’s prognostications are sure
to get people talking. We discussed them with Bernie Meyerson, the vice
president of innovation at IBM, and he told us that the goal of the
predictions is to better marshal the company’s resources in order to
make them come true.
“We try to get a sense of where the world is going because that
focuses where we put our efforts,” Meyerson said. “The harder part is
nailing down what you want to focus on. Unless you stick your neck out
and say this is where the world is going, it’s hard to you can turn
around and say you will get there first. These are seminal shifts. We
want to be there, enabling them.”
In a nutshell, IBM says:- The classroom will learn you.
- Buying local will beat online.
- Doctors will use your DNA to keep you well.
- A digital guardian will protect you online.
- The city will help you live in it.
Meyerson said that this year’s ideas are based on the fact that
everything will learn. Machines will learn about us, reason, and engage
in a much more natural and personalized way. IBM can already figure out your personality by deciphering 200 of your tweets, and its capability to read your wishes will only get better. The innovations are being enabled by cloud computing, big data analytics (the company recently formed its own customer-focused big data analytics lab),
and adaptive learning technologies. IBM believes the technologies will
be developed with the appropriate safeguards for privacy and security,
but each of these predictions raises additional privacy and security
issues.
As computers get smarter and more compact, they will be built into
more devices that help us do things when we need them done. IBM believes
that these breakthroughs in computing will amplify our human abilities.
The company came up with the predictions by querying its 220,000
technical people in a bottoms-up fashion and tapping the leadership of
its vast research labs in a top-down effort.
IBM
In five years, the classroom will learn you to help tailor instruction to your individual needs.
The classroom will learn you
Globally, two out of three adults haven’t gotten the equivalent of a
high school education. But IBM believes the classrooms of the future
will give educators the tools to learn about every student, providing
them with a tailored curriculum from kindergarten to high school.
“Your teacher spends time getting to know you every year,” Meyerson
said. “What if they already knew everything about how you learn?”
In the next five years, IBM believes teachers will use “longitudinal
data” such as test scores, attendance, and student behavior on
electronic learning platforms — and not just the results of aptitude
tests. Sophisticated analytics delivered over the cloud will help
teachers make decisions about which students are at risk, their
roadblocks, and the way to help them. IBM is working on a research
project with the Gwinnett County Public Schools in Georgia, the 14th
largest school district in the U.S. with 170,000 students. The goal is
to increase the district’s graduation rate. And after a $10 billion
investment in analytics, IBM believes it can harness big data to help
students out.
IBM
In five years, buying local will beat online as you get online data at your fingertips in the store.
Buying local will beat online
Online sales topped $1 trillion worldwide last year, and many
physical retailers have gone out of business as they fail to compete on
price with the likes of Amazon. But innovations for physical stores will
make buying local turn out better. Retailers will use the immediacy of
the store and proximity to customers to create experiences that
online-only retail can’t replicate. The innovations will bring the power
of the Web right to where the shopper can touch it. Retailers could
rely on artificial intelligence akin to IBM’s Watson, which played Jeopardy
better than many human competitors. The Web can make sales associates
smarter, and augmented reality can deliver more information to the store
shelves. With these technologies, stores will be able to anticipate
what a shopper most wants and needs.
“The store will ask if you would like to see a certain camera and
have a salesperson meet you in a certain aisle where it is located,”
Meyerson said. “The ability to do this painlessly, without the normal
hassle of trying to find help, is very powerful.”
This technology will get so good that online retailers are likely to set up retail showrooms to help their own sales.
“It has been physical against online,” Meyerson said. “But in this
case, it is combining them. What that enables you to do is that
mom-and-pop stores can offer the same services as the big online
retailers. The tech they have to serve you is as good as anything in
online shopping. It is an interesting evolution but it is coming.”
IBM
In five years, doctors will routinely use your DNA to keep you well.
Doctors will use your DNA to keep you well
Global cancer rates are expected to jump by 75 percent by 2030. IBM
wants computers to help doctors understand how a tumor affects a patient
down to their DNA. They could then figure out what medications will
best work against the cancer, and fulfill it with a personalized cancer
treatment plan. The hope is that genomic insights will reduce the time
it takes to find a treatment down from weeks to minutes.
“The ability to correlate a person’s DNA against the results of
treatment with a certain protocol could be a huge breakthrough,”
Meyerson said. It’ll be able to scan your DNA and find out if any magic
bullet treatments exist that will address your particular ailment.
IBM recently made a breakthrough with a nanomedicine
that it can engineer to latch on to fungal cells in the body and attack
them by piercing their cell membranes. The fungi won’t be able to adapt
to these kinds of physical attacks easily. That sort of advance, where
the attack is tailored against particular kinds of cells, will be more
common in the future.
IBM
In five years, a digital guardian will protect you online.
A digital guardian will protect you online
We have multiple passwords, identifications, and devices than ever
before. But security across them is highly fragmented. In 2012, 12
million people were victims of identity fraud in the U.S. In five years,
IBM envisions a digital guardian that will become trained to focus on
the people and items it’s entrusted with. This smart guardian will sort
through contextual, situational, and historical data to verify a
person’s identity on different devices. The guardian can learn about a
user and make an inference about behavior that is out of the norm and
may be the result of someone stealing that person’s identity. With 360
degrees of data about someone, it will be much harder to steal an
identity.
“In this case, you don’t look for the signature of an attack,” Meyerson said. “It looks at your behavior with a device and spots something anomalous. It screams when there is something out of the norm.”
IBM
In five years, the city will help you live in it.
The city will help you live in it
IBM says that, by 2030, the towns and cities of the developing world
will make up 80 percent of urban humanity and by 2050, seven out of
every 10 people will be a city dweller. To deal with that growth, the
only way cities can manage is to have automation, where smarter cities
can understand in real-time how billions of events occur as computers
learn to understand what people need, what they like, what they do, and
how they move from place to place.
IBM predicts that cities will digest information freely provided by
citizens to place resources where they are needed. Mobile devices and
social engagement will help citizens strike up a conversation with their
city leaders. Such a concept is already in motion in Brazil, where IBM
researchers are working with a crowdsourcing tool that people can use to
report accessibility problems, via their mobile phones, to help those
with disabilities better navigate urban streets.
Of course, as in the upcoming video game Watch Dogs from Ubisoft, a
bad guy could hack into the city and use its monitoring systems in
nefarious ways. But Meyerson said, “I’d rather have the city linked.
Then I can protect it. You have an agent that looks over the city. If
some wise guy wants to make the sewage pumps run backwards, the system
will shut that down.”
The advantage of the ultraconnected city is that feedback is instantaneous and the city government can be much more responsive.