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A tech company's most compelling product is the future it's creating. In practical terms, that means the products it's selling -- the data-crunching tools, the communications-management suites, the collaboration workspaces, the networking and security underpinnings. "Buy the product and the job becomes easier" is the implicit promise.
In slightly loftier terms, the future a tech company sells is the one where the products are secondary to the purpose you're using them -- a future where people who use the company's products are doing big things to improve the world.
The future IBM promised in its Research Science Slam on Monday afternoon is one where you can trust your data to be secure, your AI free of data bias, your algae to be working hard to keep us all in clean air, and your computing to be quantum.
What is a Science Slam? A slam, as senior vice president Arvid Krishna explained, is a way to quickly convey ideas in a format for all audiences. "It gives the researchers a chance to present their work in a series of short, narrative stories."
In Monday's slam, five different presenters, picked from 3000 scientists in 12 labs across six continents, talked about five technologies they think will change the world in the next five years.
They are:
Cryptoanchors to Fight Counterfeiting
Andreas Kind, who leads "Industry Platform and Blockchain" at IBM Research Zurich in Switzerland, began by explaining the threat of counterfeit products. It goes beyond "this fake Louis Vuitton hangbag dings a luxury conglomerate's quarterly profits." Counterfeiting is a public safety threat, affecting everything from fake medicine to cars. In fact, Kind says, 40 percent of aftermarket automotive parts are actually counterfeits.
"The root of the problem is that global supply chains have become very complex, with many participants," Kind said. As a result, it's easy for one link in the chain to be swapped out for a bogus one.
The problem with inventory-tracking systems right now is that what's digital stays digital -- say, a product ID number -- and what's in the physical work stays there, wholly separate. Even if a product is tagged with a physical tag, it's not hard to break the supply chain monitoring.
"The trust...