Here’s a roundup of the remaining innovations predicted and announced by IBM at the Think Warsaw conference earlier this week:
AI Bias may soon no longer be a thing
Artificial intelligence has found its place in numerous industries, but the quality of these systems relies entirely on the data placed within them. Bad, biased data often causes AI to work incorrectly, and results in biased behavior in decision-making. Ensuring a truly neutral AI system actively contributes towards building trust between these machines and consumers, as well as teaching us to become more egalitarian ourselves.
IBM’s researchers believe to have found a method to reduce such bias in training AI, so that the systems do not perpetuate these inequities further, as they learn from their initial training dataset. Using a brand new rating system which can measure the fairness of an AI system, scientists will be able to see whether machines are able to see whether the recent advances in AI tech will be able to contribute towards truly unbiased AI.
Latttice Cryptography could make our data more secure than ever
With nearly every sphere of our lives going digital, we can no longer rely on our pre-existing security measures for the online world. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, by 2021 cyber crime damages are expecte to hit 6 trillion dollars anually, so more complex security measures are simply crucial at this point. While at this point in time, files aren’t laying out in the open for hackers to take, common encryption processes only protect our files during transit and while we’re not using them. Meanwhile, once we gain access to the data, quite possibly, so do the potential hackers.
IBM predicts that the new security protocols for data encription could involve lattice cryptography. The architecture could hide the most sensitive data within complex algebraic structure, so that it could not be accessed from the outside without solving an extensive amount of math problems. The technology could also be paired with a different technology – Fully Homomorphic Encryption – which would enable quantum computers to solve the algebraic calculations without ever accessing the protected data itself. This way, our files could stay protected even from a faut-tolerant, universal quantum computer from the future.
Quantum Computing is finally on its way
So, speaking of quantum computing, are we there yet? Not quite, but IBM’s reserchers do think that the technology will finally reach beyond the lab within the next five years. This new generation of machines will use an entirely new method of processing, which bases on quantum mehanics. Although the current generation of computers is getting increasingly powerful with every year, there are certain problems they will never be able to solve.
According to this position on the 5-in-5 list, quantum computers will soon be used to work alongside classical computers, enabling them to solve problems involving challenges such as exponential scaling or chemistry speculations. IBM also predicts that the technology will soon enter university classrooms around the world, and become embedded in a range of curricula for science and engineering programs.
The list of five innovations announced today points towards the directions of science development which will have a significant impact of our lives, as well as the world around us in the future. We can already see that the era of quantum computer is entering a decisive sta of development, and artificial intelligence can more and more efficiently support people in their activities. – says Jarosław Szymczuk, CEO of IBM Poland and the Baltic States.
To find out more about IBM’s research areas, feel free to check out their website.