Paper Info
Title
Frontiers of information technology
Abstract
Every year, the IBM Research Division undertakes a year-long process to analyze and map out important trends and future directions shaping the advances and the applications of information technology (IT). The results are summarized in a document called the Global Technology Outlook (GTO), which influences IBM's strategy and technology roadmaps. Coinciding with the IBM Centennial, a special chapter was commissioned in the 2011 GTO, which was designed to both reflect on the historical evolution of computers and computation as well as to look a few decades ahead to explore the new frontiers of IT. This paper presents the results of this study. It provides a vision of the future in which advances in technology will enable the creation of a new class of "learning" systems, i.e., designed with people as an integral and central element of the process, and which are explicitly aimed to enhance human cognition. These systems will learn from both structured and unstructured data, find important correlations, create hypotheses for these correlations, and suggest and measure actions to enable better outcomes for users. Systems with these capabilities will transform our view of computers from "calculators" to "machines that learn," which is a shift that will radically alter our expectations of what computing ought to do for us as humans and that will equip us to successfully navigate the increasing complexity of our globally interconnected world.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1147/JRD.2011.2163275
IBM Journal of Research and Development
Keywords
DocType
Volume
technology roadmaps,important correlation,important trend,information technology,ibm centennial,ibm research division,new class,new frontier,future direction,year-long process
Journal
55
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
5
0018-8646
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
9
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
D. E. Dillenberger100.34
D. Gil200.34
S. V. Nitta300.34
M. B. Ritter4417.84