IBM Reveals Five Innovations that will Help Change our Lives within Five Years
Yorktown Heights, N.Y. – 5 January 2017
– IBM (NYSE: IBM)
unveiled today the annual “IBM
5 in 5” (#ibm5in5) – a list of
ground-breaking scientific innovations with the potential to change the
way people work, live, and interact during the next five years.
·
With
AI, our words will open a window into our mental health
·
Hyperimaging
and AI will give us superhero vision
·
Macroscopes
will help us understand Earth’s complexity in infinite detail
·
Medical
labs “on a chip” will serve as health detectives for tracing disease
at the nanoscale
·
Smart
sensors will detect environmental pollution at the speed of light
In 1609, Galileo invented the telescope and
saw our cosmos in an entirely new way. He proved the theory that Earth
and other planets in our solar system revolve around the Sun, which until
then was impossible to observe. IBM
Research continues this work through
the pursuit of new scientific instruments – whether physical devices or
advanced software tools – designed to make what’s invisible in our world
visible, from the macroscopic level down to the nanoscale.
“The scientific community has a wonderful
tradition of creating instruments to help us see the world in entirely
new ways. For example, the microscope helped us see objects too small for
the naked eye and the thermometer helped us understand the temperature
of the Earth and human body,” said Dario Gil, vice president of science
& solutions at IBM Research. “With advances in artificial
intelligence and nanotechnology,
we aim to invent a new generation of scientific instruments that will make
the complex invisible systems in our world today visible over the next
five years.”
Innovation in this area could enable us to
dramatically improve farming, enhance energy efficiency, spot harmful pollution
before it’s too late, and prevent premature physical and mental health
decline as examples. IBM’s global team of scientists and researchers is
steadily bringing these inventions from the realm of our labs to the real
world.
The IBM
5 in 5 is based on market and societal
trends as well as emerging technologies from IBM’s Research labs around
the world that can make these transformations possible. Here are the five
scientific instruments that will make the invisible visible in the next
5 years:
With
AI, our words will open a window into our mental health
Brain disorders, including developmental,
psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases, represent an enormous disease
burden, in terms of human suffering and economic cost. https://mcgovern.mit.edu/brain-disorders/by-the-numbers
2 Speech
Graphs Provide a Quantitative Measure of Thought Disorder in PsychosisPLoS One, 2012
For example, today, one
in five adults in the U.S. experiences
a mental health condition such as depression, bipolar disease or schizophrenia,
and roughly
half of individuals with severe
psychiatric disorders receive no treatment. The global
cost of mental health conditionsis projected to surge to US$6 trillion by 2030.
If the brain is a black box that we don’t
fully understand, then speech is a key to unlock it. In five years, what
we say and write will be used as indicators of our mental health and physical
wellbeing. Patterns in our speech and writing analyzed by new cognitive
systems will provide tell-tale signs of early-stage developmental disorders,
mental illness and degenerative neurological diseases that can help doctors
and patients better predict, monitor and track these conditions.
At IBM, scientists are using transcripts
and audio inputs from psychiatric interviews, coupled with machine learning
techniques, to find patterns in speech to help clinicians accurately predict
and monitor psychosis, schizophrenia, mania and depression. Today, it only
takes about 300 words to help clinicians predict the probability of psychosis
in a user.2
In the future, similar techniques could be
used to help patients with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s disease,
PTSD and even neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism and ADHD. Cognitive
computers can analyze a patient’s speech or written words to look for
tell-tale indicators found in language, including meaning, syntax and intonation.
Combining the results of these measurements with those from wearable devices
and imaging systems and collected in a secure network can paint a more
complete picture of the individual for health professionals to better identify,
understand and treat the underlying disease.
What were once invisible signs will become
clear signals of patients’ likelihood of entering a certain mental state
or how well their treatment plan is working, complementing regular clinical
visits with daily assessments from the comfort of their homes.
Hyperimaging
and AI will give us superhero vision
More than 99.9 percent of the electromagnetic
spectrum cannot be observed by the naked eye. Over the last 100 years,
scientists have built instruments that can emit and sense energy at different
wavelengths. Today, we rely on some of these to take medical images of
our body, see the cavity inside our tooth, check our bags at the airport,
or land a plane in fog. However, these instruments are incredibly specialized
and expensive and only see across specific portions of the electromagnetic
spectrum.
In five years, new imaging devices using
hyperimaging technology and AI will help us see broadly beyond the domain
of visible light by combining multiple bands of the electromagnetic spectrum
to reveal valuable insights or potential dangers that would otherwise be
unknown or hidden from view. Most importantly, these devices will be portable,
affordable and accessible, so superhero vision can be part of our everyday
experiences.
A view of the invisible or vaguely visible
physical phenomena all around us could help make road and traffic conditions
clearer for drivers and self-driving cars. For example, using millimeter
wave imaging, a camera and other sensors, hyperimaging technology could
help a car see through fog or rain, detect hazardous and hard-to-see road
conditions such as black ice, or tell us if there is some object up ahead
and its distance and size. Cognitive computing technologies will reason
about this data and recognize what might be a tipped over garbage can versus
a deer crossing the road, or a pot hole that could result in a flat tire.
Embedded in our phones, these same technologies
could take images of our food to show its nutritional value or whether
it’s safe to eat. A hyperimage of a pharmaceutical drug or a bank check
could tell us what’s fraudulent and what’s not. What was once beyond
human perception will come into view.
IBM scientists are today building a compact
hyperimaging platform that “sees” across separate portions of the electromagnetic
spectrum in one platform to potentially enable a host of practical and
affordable devices and applications.
Macroscopes
will help us understand Earth’s complexity in infinite detail
Today, the physical world only gives us a
glimpse into our interconnected and complex ecosystem. We collect exabytes
of data – but most of it is unorganized. In fact, an estimated
80 percent of a data scientist’s
time is spent scrubbing data instead of analyzing and understanding what
that data is trying to tell us.
Thanks to the Internet
of Things, new sources of data
are pouring in from millions of connected objects — from refrigerators,
light bulbs and your heart rate monitor to remote sensors such as drones,
cameras, weather stations, satellites and telescope arrays. There are already
more than six
billion connected devices generating
tens of exabytes of data per month, with a growth rate of more than 30
percent per year. After successfully digitizing information, business transactions
and social interactions, we are now in the process of digitizing the physical
world.
In five years, we will use machine learning
algorithms and software to help us organize the information about the physical
world to help bring the vast and complex data gathered by billions of devices
within the range of our vision and understanding. We call this a “macroscope”
– but unlike the microscope to see the very small, or the telescope that
can see far away, it is a system of software and algorithms to bring all
of Earth’s complex data together to analyze it for meaning.
By aggregating, organizing and analyzing
data on climate, soil conditions, water levels and their relationship to
irrigation practices, for example, a new generation of farmers will have
insights that help them determine the right crop choices, where to plant
them and how to produce optimal yields while conserving precious water
supplies.
In 2012, IBM Research began investigating
this concept at Gallo Winery, integrating irrigation, soil and weather
data with satellite images and other sensor data to predict the specific
irrigation needed to produce an optimal grape yield and quality. In the
future, macroscope technologies will help us scale this concept to anywhere
in the world.
Beyond our own planet, macroscope technologies could handle, for example,
the complicated indexing and correlation of various layers and volumes
of data collected by telescopes to predict asteroid collisions with one
another and learn more about their composition.
Medical
labs “on a chip” will serve as health detectives for tracing disease
at the nanoscale
Early detection of disease is crucial. In
most cases, the earlier the disease is diagnosed, the more likely it is
to be cured or well controlled. However, diseases like cancer can be hard
to detect – hiding in our bodies before symptoms appear. Information about
the state of our health can be extracted from tiny bio particles in bodily
fluids such as saliva, tears, blood, urine and sweat. Existing scientific
techniques face challenges for capturing and analyzing these bio particles,
which are thousands of times smaller than the diameter of a strand of human
hair.
In the next five years, new medical labs
“on a chip” will serve as nanotechnology health detectives – tracing
invisible clues in our bodily fluids and letting us know immediately if
we have reason to see a doctor. The goal is to shrink down to a single
silicon chip all of the processes necessary to analyze a disease that would
normally be carried out in a full-scale biochemistry lab.
The lab-on-a-chip technology could ultimately
be packaged in a convenient handheld device to allow people to quickly
and regularly measure the presence of biomarkers found in small amounts
of bodily fluids, sending this information securely streaming into the
cloud from the convenience of their home. There it could be combined with
real-time health data from other IoT-enabled devices, like sleep monitors
and smart watches, and analyzed by AI systems for insights. When taken
together, this data set will give us an in depth view of our health and
alert us to the first signs of trouble, helping to stop disease before
it progresses.
At IBM Research, scientists are developing
lab-on-a-chip nanotechnology that can separate and isolate bioparticles
down to 20 nanometers in diameter, a scale that gives access to DNA, viruses,
and exosomes. These particles could be analyzed to potentially reveal the
presence of disease even before we have symptoms.
Smart
sensors will detect environmental pollution at the speed of light
Most pollutants are invisible to the human eye, until their effects make
them impossible to ignore. Methane, for example, is the primary component
of natural gas, commonly considered a clean energy source. But if methane
leaks into the air before being used, it can warm the Earth’s atmosphere.
Methane is estimated to be the
second largest contributor to global
warming after carbon dioxide (CO2).
In the United States, emissions from oil and gas systems are the largest
industrial source of methane gas in the atmosphere. The U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) estimatesthat more than nine million metric tons of methane leaked from natural
gas systems in 2014. Measured as CO2-equivalent over 100 years, that’s
more greenhouse gases than were emitted by all U.S. iron and steel, cement
and aluminum manufacturing facilities combined.
In five years, new, affordable sensing technologies deployed near natural
gas extraction wells, around storage facilities, and along distribution
pipelines will enable the industry to pinpoint invisible leaks in real-time.
Networks of IoT sensors wirelessly connected to the cloud will provide
continuous monitoring of the vast natural gas infrastructure, allowing
leaks to be found in a matter of minutes instead of weeks, reducing pollution
and waste and the likelihood of catastrophic events.
Scientists at IBM are tackling this vision, working with natural gas producers
such as Southwestern Energy to explore the development of an intelligent
methane monitoring system and as part of the ARPA-E
Methane Observation Networks with Innovative Technology to Obtain Reductions
(MONITOR) program.
At the heart of IBM’s research is silicon
photonics, an evolving technology that transfers data by light, allowing
computing literally at the speed of light. These chips could be embedded
in a network of sensors on the ground or within infrastructure, or even
fly on autonomous drones; generating insights that, when combined with
real-time wind data, satellite data, and other historical sources, can
be used to build complex environmental models to detect the origin and
quantity of pollutants as they occur.
For more information about the IBM 5 in 5,
visit http://ibm.biz/five-in-five.
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