IBM: Five innovations that will change your life in the next five years, from the invisible to the visible

In 1609, Galileo invented the telescope, which expanded human vision to the universe. According to his theoretical analysis, the Earth and other planets in the solar system are all revolving around the sun. Although this was not observable at the time. Today in the 21st century, with the advancement of science and technology, IBM Research can produce more advanced technical equipment and more advanced software tools to continue exploring the unknown world, aiming to further expand our vision. 

5 in 5: IBM predicts the top five innovations that will have the greatest impact on humanity in the next five years.

In the next five years, the words we speak and write will become signals of our mental and physical health. The latest cognitive systems can analyze speech and writing patterns to find early warning signs of developmental disorders, mental/psychological illness and neurodegenerative diseases, helping doctors and patients better predict, monitor and track people's health.

Mental illness, neurodegenerative diseases and other brain disorders have put humanity in a shadow of pain and placed a huge economic burden on it. Currently, one in five adults in the United States suffers from mental health disorders, and about half of patients with serious mental illnesses go untreated each year. By 2030, the global cost of treating mental illness is expected to increase to $6 trillion.

Cognitive computers can analyze a patient's speech or writing to find early warning signs in language meaning, syntax, and intonation. Combining these results with data from wearable devices and imaging systems can present a more complete picture of an individual, helping doctors better identify, understand, and treat potential diseases. This technology can help patients with Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and even behavioral disorders such as autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

The signals that were originally invisible and intangible will become clear signals for determining whether a patient has entered a certain psychological state or measuring the specific effectiveness of a treatment plan, becoming an effective supplement to routine clinical evaluations.

In the future, this innovation can bring the following changes to our lives:

At IBM, scientists are using text and audio from mental patients to help clinicians accurately predict and monitor the forms of psychosis, schizophrenia, mania, and depression through machine learning technology. Now only about 300 words are needed to help clinicians predict whether a patient has a mental illness.

△ IBM researchers are using machine learning and natural language processing to analyze spoken and written language to help better understand the workings of the human brain.

With the development of technology in the next five years, humans are likely to have "superhuman" X-ray imaging capabilities.

Powerful super imaging technology combined with high-speed processing power of artificial intelligence can make us see more of the world than ever before, allowing us to see valuable things or reveal potential risks. What's more, these devices are small and portable, and can be put in a pocket or mounted on sunglasses.

More than 99.9% of the electromagnetic spectrum cannot be seen by the naked eye. In the past 100 years, scientists have invented many instruments that can emit or receive electromagnetic waves of different wavelengths. Some of these technologies can be used in medical imaging, tooth cavity detection, airport security, and aircraft navigation. But these are professional-grade equipment, expensive, and can only see certain specific wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Being able to see obscure physical phenomena can help drivers or self-driving cars better understand road conditions. For example, with millimeter wave imaging, cameras, and other sensors, super imaging technology can help cars penetrate fog or heavy rain, detect dangerous road conditions such as "black ice," and even help us understand the distance and size of objects in front of us. With computing technology, we can also analyze this data and find out what caused the tire to blow, whether it was an animal crossing the road, a trash can overturned at an intersection, or even a pothole in the road.

IBM R&D is developing a portable hyperspectral imaging platform that can "see" different bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. In other words, if the platform is successfully developed, it means that an economical and practical spectral imaging device may enter daily life. It is predicted that once this technology for imaging in two or more different spectral bands is successfully developed, we will find that there are many substances in the world around us that were previously invisible to the naked eye.

△ Members of the IBM hyperspectral imaging research team. From left to right: Xiaoxiong Gu, Yahya Tousi, Alberto Valdes-Garcia and Mehmet Soyuer.

When these technologies are applied to mobile phones, they may lead to profound changes in many industries. You can use mobile phone photos to analyze the nutritional value of food and determine whether the food is safe to eat. In the fields of medicine and banking, the use of super imaging technology can help users identify fraud. This technology can show orange to color blind people, making it easier for self-driving cars to drive in fog and rain.

△ Millimeter-wave phased array sensor, a key hardware component of the portable super-spectral imaging platform.

In the next five years, we will use machine learning and software to organize information about the physical world and analyze the huge and complex data collected from billions of devices around the world. This is called "macro-vision technology", which is a software system with algorithms. Unlike a microscope that is used to observe very small things, or a telescope that can see very far, it puts all the complex data on the earth together for analysis, making the data more meaningful.

Today’s physical world only gives us a glimpse into interconnected and complex ecosystems. We collect terabytes of data, most of which are irregular. In fact, “cleaning data” takes up about 80% of a data scientist’s time, and the rest of the time is spent analyzing and explaining the data to us.

The emergence of the Internet of Things has made data sources more extensive. All objects connected to the Internet can generate massive amounts of data, including refrigerators, light bulbs, heart rate monitors, remote control sensors, drones, cameras, satellites and telescope arrays.

More than 6 billion connected devices generate billions of exabytes of data every month, with an annual growth rate of more than 30%. After successfully digitizing information, business transactions, and social interactions, we are now in the process of digitizing the physical world.

Hongjing Technology has the potential to transform many industries while solving some of the most fundamental problems we face, such as the availability of food, water and energy. For example, by aggregating, organizing and analyzing various data (climate, soil environment, water level) and their relationship with irrigation activities, future farmers will be able to gain first-class insights to choose the right crops, planting locations and the best farming methods to increase production while saving precious water resources.

In addition to learning about Earth, the data collected by the telescope, through advanced indexing and correlation processing, can also help us understand asteroid collisions and their composition.

In 2012, IBM Research began testing this technology at Gallo Winery, combining irrigation, soil and weather data with satellite imagery and other sensor data to predict the irrigation methods needed to achieve optimal grape yields and high-quality grapes. In the future, Grandview Technology will help us expand this concept around the world.

By using new indexing methods such as intelligent cognition, parallel processing, and machine learning to analyze data from the physical world, we will better illuminate the complexity of the Earth and discover more “invisible” mysteries.

△ Hendrik Hamman, a physics research analyst at IBM Research, runs the big data platform developed by his team for a demonstration.

In the next five years, new “medical labs on a chip” could serve as nanoscale health monitors—tracking invisible clues from our bodily fluids to let us know immediately whether to see a doctor. The ultimate goal is to compress all the biochemical experiments needed to analyze a disease onto a single chip.

△ IBM medical laboratory on a chip.

Early detection of disease is crucial. In most cases, the earlier a disease is diagnosed, the greater the chances of cure or control. However, diseases like cancer or Parkinson's disease are difficult to detect early, hiding in our bodies before symptoms appear. Body fluids such as saliva, tears, blood, urine and sweat contain information about our health, which we can extract from tiny bioparticles in them. But existing technology makes it difficult to capture and analyze these bioparticles because their diameter is thousands of times smaller than a human hair.

This lab-on-a-chip technology will be encapsulated in future handheld devices so that people can quickly and regularly measure disease signals in body fluids, and this information can be securely transmitted from the cloud. Sleep monitors and other wearable devices such as smart watches can send real-time health monitoring data from the cloud to AI systems. When this data is combined, we will have a deeper understanding of our health, get detailed advice on how to stay healthy, and receive warning signs from doctors remotely that we may be ill.

Scientists at IBM Research are developing nanoscale chip labs that can separate and isolate biological particles as small as 20 nanometers in diameter, which is enough to capture DNA , viruses and exosomes. By analyzing these particles, early disease screening can be achieved. This technology is called liquid biopsy and is designed to be easier to operate than traditional tissue biopsy or cancer screening technology.

△ A chip designed by IBM scientists to screen tiny particles in body fluids for early disease detection.

A prototype of an instrument for liquid biopsy of patients, such as analyzing urine samples.

△ IBM researchers work in the nanotechnology laboratory at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center.

In five years, new, inexpensive sensing technologies will be deployed near almost all natural gas wells, around storage facilities, and along transportation pipelines to accurately locate gas leaks that are invisible to the naked eye. The Internet of Things, which connects to the cloud via wireless networks, can continuously monitor the vast natural gas infrastructure and find leaks in just a few minutes, rather than the weeks it took before. This will not only reduce pollution and waste, but may also prevent catastrophic accidents.

Most pollutants are invisible to the naked eye, but they can have significant impacts that we don’t notice until they become visible. For example, methane is the main component of natural gas, which is widely considered to be a green and clean energy source. But if methane leaks into the air, it will produce a greenhouse effect. It is estimated that methane is the second largest source of climate warming after carbon dioxide.

In the United States, leaks from oil and gas systems are the largest industrial source of methane in the atmosphere. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that in 2014 alone, more than 9 million metric tons of methane were leaked from natural gas systems. This amount of methane is more than the total greenhouse gas emissions from all steel, cement and aluminum manufacturing in the United States combined.

IBM is working with natural gas producer Southwestern Energy to develop an intelligent methane monitoring system as part of the ARPA-E Methane Observation Network for Emission Reduction Using Innovative Technologies (MONITOR) project.

At the heart of IBM's research is silicon photonics, a developing technology that can transmit data via light and enable computation at the speed of light. These chips can be built into sensor networks on the ground or in infrastructure, or even mounted on drones. When combined with real-time wind data, satellite data and other historical data, complex environmental models can be built to quickly identify sources and emissions of pollutants when pollution occurs.

△ IBM scientists use microscopes to make and design infrared light sensor chips for detecting methane.

△ IBM researchers Chi Xiong, Norma Sosa and Will Green are testing sensors in the lab.