Cats aren’t dogs. Even modern AI knows that. But how exactly AI distinguishes cat images from those of dogs is not clear. Standard neural networks are akin to a black box, as even the people who program them often have little to no idea how they make decisions. It’s not as critical when it’s just a picture of a cute puppy or a kitten. But it becomes important when an AI tries to interpret, say, a sequence of weather images that show the formation of a hurricane and its propagation across the Atlantic. In this case, the AI might predict hurricanes and winds that have never been observed or meas ..read more

Actions have consequences. And typically, when something happens, the order of the causes of the event really does matter. But understanding exactly how each action affects the final result is not always easy. Our latest work, “Order-Dependent Event Models for Agent Interactions,” presented at the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization (IJCAI), can help. Take two countries historically in conflict. Say one makes a negative statement about the other, leading the latter to retaliate but not as strongly. It then becomes more likely that the first country will reac ..read more

Analysts’ reports, corporate earnings, stock prices, interest rates. Financial data isn’t an easy read. And there’s a lot of it. Typically, teams of human experts go through and make sense of financial data. But as the volume of sources keeps surging, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for any human to read, absorb, understand, correlate, and act on all the available information. We want to help. In our recent work, “The Squawk Bot”: Joint Learning of Time Series and Text Data Modalities for Automated Financial Information Filtering, we detail an AI and machine learning mechanism that helps ..read more

From recruitment to credit risk apps, or use in the healthcare and criminal justice system, AI unreliability has been giving researchers headaches for years. We’ve tackled the issue by flipping it upside down. Our team has developed an AI that verifies other AIs’ “fairness” by generating a set of counterfactual text samples and testing machine learning systems without supervision. In our recent paper, “Generate Your Counterfactuals: Towards Controlled Counterfactual Generation for Text” accepted to AAAI 2021, we describe how our software, dubbed GYC, generates test cases to check the reliabili ..read more

Sometimes, the key to unlocking new realms of quantum computing’s power is… classical computing. By allowing quantum and classical resources to do what they do best, our team has demonstrated the potential power of dynamic circuits—those where we perform a measurement in a quantum circuit and then feed the resulting classical information to a later quantum calculation—a demonstration that provides an advantage over static circuits run on quantum computers alone. Today’s announcement of the IBM Quantum development roadmap charts a course towards a comprehensive software ecosystem, and crucially ..read more

Quantum computing is on the verge of sparking a paradigm shift. Software reliant on this nascent technology, one rooted in the physical laws of nature, could soon revolutionize computing forever. Bear in mind, however, that it took classical computing many decades to go from individually programmed logic gates to the sophisticated cloud-based services of today—and we hope to see quantum computing take that same leap in just a few short years. We think we can get there, but we can’t take this leap alone. Back in September 2020, we took the bold step of releasing a hardware roadmap showing a cle ..read more

You know a shirt belongs in a wardrobe. I know a shirt belongs in a wardrobe. Does an AI know that? Typically, not. But it can learn by interacting with the world around it. We wanted to boost this technique, known as Reinforcement Learning, by injecting common sense into an AI model — and helping it to learn faster. In a recent paper, “Text-based RL Agents with Commonsense Knowledge: New Challenges, Environments and Baselines,” introduced at the 2021 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, we describe an AI that trades off “exploration” of the world with “exploitation” of its action strat ..read more

Cloud technology has certainly brought along more convenience, enabling anyone to access their photos, email and other applications anywhere and at anytime. But not all companies have moved everything to the cloud just yet. Those looking to migrate typically have to break down their apps into smaller chunks in a process dubbed refactoring — or restructuring their computer code without changing its intended functions. These chunks, called clusters or microservices, then get supported by cloud-native applications, and developers can choose any programming language they want to manage them ..read more

“I relish pushing myself” chuckles Dr. Heike Riel, IBM Fellow — who has just been named a Fellow of the prestigious American Physical Society (APS). “No matter if it’s math, handball, playing the accordion, or breaking new ground in quantum computing — I enjoy giving my best at everything I do. And if it works it’s even more fun.” Dr. Heike Riel, an IBM Fellow and head of Science and Technology and IBM Research Europe Quantum lead, has been named an APS Fellow. With such a zest for life, it’s no wonder Riel, who is head of Science and Technology and IBM Research Europe & A ..read more

Average ‘legacy’ applications written for an earlier operating system or hardware platform that many companies are still using can be huge: think millions of lines of archaic code written and evolved by teams who may have moved on. More than 80 percent of these old-but-necessary apps remain on physical machines built a long time ago and often with scarce documentation – but which are still critical to the business, as they’re still in use, or need to be kept for records compliance. To help the developers that update these applications, our team has created Mono2Micro (monolith-to-mic ..read more