IBM's five life-changing innovations

In the next five years, everything will be able to learn - driven by a new era of cognitive systems where machines will learn, reason and engage with people in a more natural and personalised way.

This is according to IBM's eighth annual "IBM 5 in 5" - a list of innovations the company says have the potential to change the way people work, live and interact during the next five years. These innovations are beginning to emerge, enabled by cloud computing, big data analytics and learning technologies all coming together, with the appropriate privacy and security considerations, for consumers, citizens, students and patients, the computing company says.

"We know more now than any other generation at any time has known. And yet, we struggle to keep up with this flood of increasingly complex information, let alone make sense of the meaning that is inherent in the massive amounts of data we are acquiring at ever faster rates," says Abe Thomas, IBM SA country GM.

"By creating technology that is explicitly designed to learn and enhance our cognition, we will usher in a new era of progress for both individuals and for society at large," he adds.

The IBM 5 in 5 is based on market and societal trends as well as emerging technologies from the company's research labs around the world. Below are the five predictions it says will define the future and impact people at a personal level.

According to IBM, the classroom of the future will give educators the tools to learn about every student, providing them with a tailored curriculum from kindergarten to high school and on to employment.

In the next five years, it says, the classroom will learn about each student using longitudinal data such as test scores, attendance and student's behaviour on e-learning platforms, not just aptitude tests. Sophisticated analytics delivered over the cloud will provide decision support to teachers so they can predict students who are most at risk, their roadblocks, and then suggest measures to help students conquer their challenges based on their individual learning style.

Online stores currently have an advantage in their ability to learn from the choices we make on the Web, says IBM, adding that today, most physical stores are limited to the insights they can gain at the point of sale - and the trend of show-rooming is making it harder to compete with online retailers which compete solely on price.

In five years, IBM predicts new innovations will make buying local du jour once again. It points out that savvy retailers will use the immediacy of the store and proximity to customers to create experiences that cannot be replicated by online-only retail. They will magnify the digital experience by bringing the Web right to where the shopper can physically touch it.

Cancer is a complicated disease, and despite tremendous advances in research and treatment, global cancer rates are expected to jump by an astounding 75% by 2030, the company says.

Imagine if treatment could be more specific and precise - where computers could help doctors understand how a tumour affects a patient down to their DNA, and present a collective set of medications shown to best attack the cancer, it adds.

In five years, says IBM, advances in big data analytics and emerging cloud-based cognitive systems, coupled with breakthroughs in genomic research and testing, could help doctors to accurately diagnose cancer and create personalised cancer treatment plans for millions of patients around the world. It also notes that smart machines will take the output of full genome sequencing and scour vast repositories of medical records and publications to learn and quickly provide specific and actionable insights on treatment options for oncologists.

IBM says in five years, each of us could be protected with our own digital guardian that will become trained to focus on the people and items it is entrusted with, offering a new level of identity theft protection.

Security will assimilate contextual, situational and historical data to verify a person's identity on different devices. By learning about users, a digital guardian can make inferences about what's normal or reasonable activity and what's not, acting as an advisor when they want it to.

By 2030, the towns and cities of the developing world will make up 80% of urban humanity, and by 2050, seven out of every 10 people will be a city dweller, says IBM.

It predicts that in five years, smarter cities will understand in real-time how billions of events occur as computers learn to understand what people need, what they like, what they do, and how they move from place to place.

Soon it will be possible for cities and their leaders to understand and digest new information freely provided by citizens, knowing which city resources are needed, where and when, so the city can dynamically optimise around the needs of the citizens, it concludes.