Each year, IBM labs select five technologies that they believe will change society and business over the next five years. All of them were presented in the "5 for 5" report, which was published today. More details about each of them will also be told by the corporation's researchers themselves at the Think 2018 forum, which will be held in Las Vegas today.
The first, or rather the first technologies that were noted this year by IBM Research, were blockchain and cryptographic anchors. They should help in the near future to start successfully combating counterfeit products, which damage the global economy annually by more than $600 billion. The idea is to use distributed registries (blockchain) to track the entire production chain of goods.
Image: YOPOS
Each of the goods will be marked with the help of special microchips running on the blockchain - cryptographic anchors. These are microcomputers the size of a grain of salt or an ink drop, which will be attached directly to each product. Thus, it will be possible to track the time and place of loading / unloading of goods, and using sensors to record and enter into the blockchain data on the conditions under which the products and goods were stored. In addition, the manufacturer himself will become known, which will eliminate the problem of fakes on the market.
In the coming years, people will no longer associate quantum computers with science fiction and something from the distant future, IBM experts believe. “In the next five years, quantum computing will be actively used by new categories of professionals and developers to solve problems that were previously considered unsolvable. The quantum computer will become commonplace in university classrooms and will even appear in some high schools, ”the corporation’s report says.
The next breakthrough is related to the two technologies listed above - cryptography and the spread of quantum computers. The fact is that quantum computers are a new era in the world of digital computing. Their capabilities are many times greater than what our conventional computers are capable of. This, of course, opens up new research opportunities for mankind. But at the same time it creates some problems, one of which is the problem of data security.
Left: 64 motherboards with two tiny computers in the top left corner. Right: a microcomputer mounted on a motherboard, on a pile of salt. Image: IBM
The fact is that all today's data encryption methods will automatically become obsolete with the spread of quantum computers, which will be able to crack any of today's protection fairly quickly. The solution to this problem should be encryption on cryptographic lattices. It hides data inside complex algebraic structures, which prevents hacking not only by today's computers, but also by future quantum machines.
Finally, two more technologies from this year's IBM Research list are related to artificial intelligence. The first of these are autonomous robotic microscopes equipped with AI. “United in a single network and distributed around the world, these microscopes will monitor in real time the most important and most endangered resource of the Earth - water ...
AI microscopes can be placed in bodies of water to track the movement of plankton in 3D, in their natural habitat and use this information to predict their behavior and monitor their health. This can help with situations such as oil spills and toxic substances runoff from the ground, as well as prevent threats such as the formation of “red tides,” IBM said in a statement.
In addition, they believe in the company, a powerful development in the near future will receive an unbiased artificial intelligence. We are talking about the quality of the selection of databases for which artificial intelligence learns. The approach to their choice should not be biased, otherwise the results of AI training will cease to be objective.
Kirill Sarkhanyants.
IBM's research division, IBM Research, publishes an annual "5 for 5" report that outlines five technologies that are set to change our world in the next five years. This time, specialists from the company's laboratories highlighted technologies related to artificial intelligence, cryptography and quantum computing.
Each year, IBM labs select five technologies that they believe will change society and business over the next five years. All of them were presented in the report "5 for 5" which was published today. More details about each of them will also be told by the corporation's researchers themselves at the Think 2018 forum, which will be held in Las Vegas today.
The first, or rather the first technologies that were noted this year by IBM Research, were blockchain and cryptographic anchors. They should help in the near future to start successfully combating counterfeit products, which damage the global economy annually by more than $600 billion. The idea is to use distributed registries (blockchain) to track the entire production chain of goods. Each of the goods will be marked with the help of special microchips running on the blockchain - cryptographic anchors. These are microcomputers the size of a grain of salt or an ink drop, which will be attached directly to each product. Thus, it will be possible to track the time and place of loading / unloading of goods, and using sensors to record and enter into the blockchain data on the conditions under which the products and goods were stored. In addition, the manufacturer himself will become known, which will eliminate the problem of fakes on the market.
quantum computers in the coming years, people will no longer be associated with science fiction and something from the distant future, IBM experts believe. “In the next five years, quantum computing will be actively used by new categories of professionals and developers to solve problems that were previously considered unsolvable. The quantum computer will become commonplace in university classrooms and will even appear in some high schools,” the corporation’s report says.
The next breakthrough is related to the two technologies listed above - cryptography and the spread of quantum computers. The fact is that quantum computers are a new era in the world of digital computing. Their capabilities are many times greater than what our conventional computers are capable of. This, of course, opens up new research opportunities for humanity. But at the same time it creates some problems, one of which is the problem of data security. The fact is that all today's data encryption methods will automatically become obsolete with the spread of quantum computers, which will be able to crack any of today's protection fairly quickly. The solution to this problem should be encryption on cryptographic lattices. It hides data inside complex algebraic structures, which prevents hacking not only by today's computers, but also by future quantum machines.
Finally, two more technologies from this year's IBM Research list are related to artificial intelligence. The first of these is autonomous robotic microscopes, equipped with AI. “Networked and distributed around the world, these microscopes will monitor in real time the most important and most endangered resource of the Earth - water… AI microscopes can be placed in water bodies to track the movement of plankton in 3D, in their natural habitat. and use this information to predict his behavior and monitor his health. This can help in situations such as oil spills and runoff of poisonous substances from the ground, as well as prevent threats such as the formation of “red tides,” IBM said in a statement.
In addition, they believe in the company, in the near future will receive powerful development unbiased artificial intelligence. We are talking about the quality of the selection of databases for which artificial intelligence learns. The approach to their choice should not be biased, otherwise the results of AI training will cease to be objective.
Kirill Sarkhanyants
Each year, IBM Corporation presents "5 in 5" - technologies that have come out of the laboratories of the company itself, which it considers the most promising for the next five years.
Each year, IBM Corporation presents "5 in 5" - technologies that have come out of the laboratories of the company itself, which it considers the most promising for the next five years. This year is no exception, the company has introduced a new five, which is worth familiarizing yourself with in more detail. As for previous forecasts, some of them turned out to be realistic, others - not, as it happens with forecasts.
This year's "Fine Five" includes quantum computing, microscopic robots, human-free artificial intelligence, cryptography and blockchain. By 2023, according to IBM experts, these technologies will make it possible to move far ahead in their development, so that the achievements will be "simply unseen." Moreover, the technologies in question will affect not only business, but the whole society.
Miniature AI-controlled microscopes will help save the seas and oceans
Representatives of the corporation are confident that within five years, miniature microscopes controlled by artificial intelligence, connected to the “cloud”, where all the collected data is sent, will monitor the state of water in many seas and oceans. In any case, in the most polluted regions.
By 2025, more than half of the world's population will live in regions where water is polluted. Somewhere stronger, somewhere weaker, but polluted. We know that our reservoirs are not in the best condition, but far from the whole situational picture is available to a person. The study of remote regions and relatively large depths is required in order to obtain the necessary data on water quality.
Already, there are specialized devices capable of monitoring the chemical composition of water in almost real time, as well as studying the presence of foreign particles.
The problem is that such devices cannot work independently, a person needs to constantly monitor them. Plus, if we talk about complex analysis, then it is not so easy to conduct it, and most importantly, it is not a cheap pleasure at all. Few business representatives or government agencies will allocate huge funds to solve environmental problems.
But there is a solution to the problem that allows you to get by with little - plankton. Miniature living organisms are a natural indicator of water health. If something goes wrong, the plankton dies or its population drops sharply. It becomes clear - there is a problem, the water is polluted.
Microscope inventor Tom Zimmerman tests prototype device
IBM engineers proposed an original solution - to place autonomous microscopes in the water, which will monitor not water or a suspension of particles in it, but plankton, tracking the movements of these organisms in three dimensions. There are no lenses in such a microscope, it depends on a chip that is in any mobile phone.
The microscope camera takes an image of the plankton passing through the holes in the chip. The data collected by miniature devices is transmitted to the cloud, where various parameters are analyzed, including the concentration of plankton in a certain volume of water, the speed of movement (which makes it possible to judge the health of organisms) and some other characteristics.
The work of microscopes will be controlled by artificial intelligence, naturally, its weak form. All this will make it possible to obtain data on the state of water in a particular region almost in real time, and the funds required for the implementation of such a project are not too large.
Cryptographic anchors and blockchain
Losses due to fraud cost companies from different areas business of about $600 million a year. In some countries, about 70% of the life-saving medicines sold in pharmacies are counterfeit. This is because the supply chain of goods to stores is quite difficult to analyze. They are entangled, sometimes intersect, sometimes run in parallel. Often scammers are connected to regular, legal supplies.
Finding problems is not so easy, since global supply chains include dozens of individual suppliers from different countries. Somewhere control is carried out well, and a fake will not be missed, but somewhere it is not at all, so low-quality and even harmful goods flow into the supply chain without any problems.
According to IBM representatives, this can be avoided by using supply control technology, which includes cryptographic anchors and blockchain.
As for "anchors", these are, as technology developers see them, digital "fingerprints" that are embedded in any product or product element. Such fingerprints are associated with the blockchain infrastructure. The identifiers themselves can be very different, the main thing is that they are all connected to the blockchain and are registered in the supply chain when passing through any of the intermediate points. It is extremely difficult to fake such “imprints”, but if the product is deprived of them, then it will immediately become clear that this product is counterfeit.
Such a mechanism is quite reliable, since it allows you to control the entire supply chain, without fear that someone will forge an identifier - with the blockchain, this becomes impossible.
IBM experts believe that the technology will be available within the next 18 months, at least in the form of test projects. But in five years, all this will become a familiar reality. "Anchors" will be put on the packaging, medicines, computer parts and much more.
In some cases, such "anchors" will be very technologically advanced and represent miniature computers, the size of a grain of salt. IBM introduced such a computer, saying that it is the smallest in the world. The cost of its production is very low, so it will be available to any company or individual (unless, of course, an ordinary person needs something similar). More details about the miniature computer have already been written on GT.
Cryptography
Hacking technologies are constantly improving. Of course, information security specialists also do not sleep, but their work is not always effective. Now encryption is a big help. But it is not a panacea either, because when encrypted data is used, they are still decoded. This allows attackers to access information in its "free" form.
Well, if quantum computers are still brought to the level of practical use, then any traditional encryption will be simply useless. So to protect your data, you will have to use other methods and technologies.
For example, the so-called lattice cryptography. This is the name of the approach to the construction of asymmetric encryption algorithms using lattices. The search for quantum-resistant problems began already in the second half of the 1990s.
According to IBM experts, these methods allow the user to access encrypted data without having to decode it. Thus, the information will remain protected in any case, there are no exceptions. And it is impossible to intercept the decoded data. An example would be examining a customer's credit history without having to extract their personal details. The computer works with encrypted data, and there is no risk. The same can be said about corporate data.
Impartial AI
Not so long ago, Geektimes reported that Twitter users were very quick to make Microsoft's AI-powered chatbot racist. After hearing about a chatbot that could evolve, users found several ways to teach it bad things and succeeded.
Actually, the problem is not so much in the chatbot, but in the fact that people train AI based on data samples with problematic elements from the human world, including racial, gender, ideological prejudices. Not every AI learns from a problematic set of data, but it happens. Over time, AI technologies will spread around the world, which means that there will not be so many “clean” data sets.
For scientists, it is vital that the decisions made by computers are not based on such problematic data. But it is quite difficult to clean up the information that is “fed” to computers, because we are talking about huge amounts of data.
IBM specialists have developed a technology that allows you to find problem areas in the information given to AI for training. As a result, an “objective” artificial intelligence will be formed, which will not be able to contribute to the spread of inequality. Its appearance, according to experts, will help to make a breakthrough in the field of training other artificial intelligence systems.
quantum computing
They have already been mentioned, but in the context of data encryption. Now we are talking about the fact that within five years quantum computing will leave the stage of laboratory experiments and will be used everywhere, by a variety of specialists.
Quantum computers are incredibly powerful machines that will help man reach new heights of knowledge. They will solve problems that were previously considered unsolvable - simply because man and his machines lacked the resources to solve. With quantum computers, things will be different.
Industry, science, medicine - many areas of knowledge will use quantum computing. Already now, access to a quantum computer (prototype) can be obtained by specialists working in the relevant field.
In five years, such computers will be available in the public domain and specialized applications will be developed for them to solve a strictly limited range of problems. And by the way, there will be new category specialists in computer technology - "programmers of quantum systems", if, of course, work with this category of computers can be considered programming.
By the way, a quantum computer has already managed to simulate a chemical reaction. Namely, to carry out a virtual reaction leading to the formation of the BeH2 compound.
No one knows. The technologies shown by IBM can both “go public” and remain in the proof-of-concept stage. However, the world does not stand still and continues to evolve. Along with it, technologies are developing, which are much more than five. Perhaps some of them will determine our future with you? published
If you have any questions on this topic, ask them to specialists and readers of our project.
IBM is a giant in the electronics industry, one of the largest companies peace. supplies
software and hardware (including stuffing for supercomputers), deals with
consulting in the field of IT services, and is also known for non-standard emissions from its secret
laboratories. For example, IBM engineers made an animated film featuring real atoms.
It is also known that IBM likes to lay out its logo in atoms on a substrate. Currently, more than half of the company's income comes from consulting services. IBM Deep Blue computer
for the first time in the world beat Garry Kasparov, a grandmaster, in chess.
The technology giant has been making very loud predictions regarding “our” technological future for many years now. And it should be noted that the percentage of correct predictions surprisingly always turns out to be higher than the percentage of incorrect ones. So this time the company presented a list of five innovative technologies, methods and discoveries that she believes will have the greatest impact on our lives over the next five years.
The corporation originated from a pre-World War I conglomerate of companies producing tabulators and chronometers. Gradually, it turned into an international technological colossus, became a pioneer in the development of electronic computers and then, in the mainframe era, an absolute monopoly. Until the 70s, the corporation was headed by the icons of American capitalism, Thomas Watson Sr. and Thomas Watson Jr.
Structure
As of January, 2016 as a part of IBM the following divisions function:
- Global Technology Services
- Software
- Systems and Technology
- Global Financing
Compared to the beginning of 2015, the structure of the company has not changed.
IBM in Russia and CIS countries
Since 2006, the IBM development center has been operating in Russia.
Assets
Data centers
As of the end of 2014, the number of IBM data centers serving the cloud infrastructure is 49.
Performance indicators
Main article:
2018: Growth of revenue for 1% to $79.6 billion
In 2018, IBM's revenue was $79.6 billion, up 1% from a year earlier. If you do not take into account fluctuations in exchange rates, the company's sales have not changed. Prior to this, the revenue of the IT giant fell for 6 years.
IBM's revenue increased largely thanks to its cloud business, which jumped 12% to $19.2 billion in 2018.
The company earned $21.7 billion from analytical solutions that for 9% exceeds an indicator of year prescription. Products for mobile devices brought the company $5 billion in revenue, which is 3% more than in 2017.
Revenue from the so-called "strategic imperatives", which IBM refers to cloud services, artificial intelligence, analytical tools, social networks, mobile technologies and solutions in the field of information security, increased by 9% year on year - to $39.8 billion.
In the division Technology Services & Cloud Platforms which is responsible for infrastructure services, services technical support and development of integration software, revenues at the level of $34.5 billion at the end of 2018 are registered. In 2017, sales were about the same.
The structure of IBM Systems, specializing in IT equipment and operating systems, recorded a 2% decline in revenue in 2018 - to $8 billion. OS brought the company $1.7 billion in revenue.
Global Business Services saw a 2% year-on-year increase in revenue to $16.8 billion. Consulting revenue increased 5% to $7.7 billion. $7.9 billion, which is 1% short of the value of 2017.
Sales of IBM cognitive solutions (this includes the Watson AI platform, analytical and information security services) in 2018 were equal to $18.5 billion, which is about the same as a year earlier.
Net profit of IBM in 2018 grew to $8.7 billion from $5.8 billion in the 2017th.
Acquisitions of companies and sale of assets
Research and development
2015
7,355 US patents
IBM's 2013 patent portfolio includes a variety of inventions that will help the company maintain its leadership position in areas such as cognitive technology, cloud computing and analytics. These inventions will also lead to a new stage in the development of cognitive systems, during which computers can learn, draw conclusions and interact with us in a more natural, personalized manner.
The number of IBM patents received in 2013 exceeded the total number of patents received by Amazon , Google , EMC , Intel , Oracle /SUN and Symantec . Over 8,000 IBM inventors in 47 US states and 41 other countries contributed to a record-breaking patent portfolio in 2013.
The top ten recipients of US patents* in 2013 are as follows:
- IBM 6809
- Canon 3825
- Sony 3098
- Hong Hai 2279
According to IFI CLAIMS Patent Services
2010: 5896 US patents
IBM announced that its inventors received 5,896 patents in 2010, placing it at the top of the world's most inventive companies list for the 18th consecutive year.
Moreover, IBM became the first company in history to receive more than 5,000 US patents in one year. The scale of this achievement helps to appreciate the fact that it took IBM scientists 50 years from the day the company was founded in 1911 to obtain the first 5 thousand patents.
The total number of patents received by IBM in 2010 is almost 4 times that of Hewlett-Packard, and more than that of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, EMC and Google combined. IBM spends about $6 billion annually on research and development.
Among the inventions that IBM highlights is a technique for collecting, analyzing and processing patient information from multiple sources of medical data to better diagnose diseases.
Another patent describes a condition prediction system traffic based on the analysis of information exchanged through short-range wireless communication channels. This invention is expected to help alert drivers to emergency road conditions.
Also in 2010, the company patented a technique for collecting and analyzing data from sensors in computer hard drives for high-precision analysis of seismic events, in particular earthquakes, which improves the efficiency and effectiveness of response emergency services in cases of natural disasters.
One of the patents, which marks IBM among the most interesting, was received by Yuri Vlasov, a native of Russia, who worked at the A.F. Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, and since 2001 has been an employee of the IBM TJ laboratory Watson Research Center located in New York State, USA.
The patent, obtained by Vlasov together with Solomon Assefa, Walter Bedell and Fengnian Xia, describes a technology that allows computer chips to communicate using light pulses instead of electrical signals, which makes it possible to increase the performance of computing systems .
In total, more than 7,000 IBM inventors from 46 different US states and 29 countries have contributed to obtaining patents. Non-US inventors of IBM contributed more than 22% of the company's total patent holdings in 2010, up 27% over the past 3 years.
"Patents, like the inventions they represent, reflect the unwavering commitment to innovation that distinguishes IBM and its people," said Kevin Reardon, IBM general manager of intellectual property and the company's vice president of research development. "Patent leadership is an important element of our strategy, which is focused on creating a technically equipped, interconnected and intelligent infrastructure that can change how diverse systems work to support a smarter planet."
In addition, competition from IBM and the desire to surpass it served as a powerful impetus for many start-up companies to own development. AT different time DEC (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies), which was just starting out, competed with IBM.
The impact of IBM on the development of Soviet IT
- Soviet ES computers are directly and creatively copied from IBM/360 computers;
- ES PC analogues of personal computers IBM;
- The operating systems of the ES computers were at least compatible with the corresponding operating systems IBM.
