healthcarereimagined

Dec 21, 2022

Naoko Kutty

Writer, Forum Agenda

Naoko Tochibayashi

Public Engagement Lead, World Economic Forum, Japan

This article is part of:Centre for Health and Healthcare

Listen to the article

• Japan’s early adoption of universal health coverage has attracted attention from around the world.
• It is seen in may quarters as one of the foundations of an equitable society.
• The key challenge is to ensure the funding and HR requirements are in place to make this approach sustainable. 

Japan’s early adoption of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) has attracted worldwide attention, as it is the country with the longest healthy life expectancy in the world. 

One of the reasons for this is that for more than half a century Japan has maintained a health insurance system that all permanent residents of Japan for more than three months are required to join, allowing people living in Japan to access appropriate healthcare services at a cost they can afford. This is characterized by a free-access system that allows patients to choose any healthcare provider, from small clinics to large hospitals with the latest medical facilities, and all medical services are provided at a uniform price anywhere in Japan.

In addition, the Japanese government has increased the number of medical schools, especially in rural areas, in order to increase the number of physicians under the One Prefecture, One Medical School policy approved by the Cabinet in 1973. This has also contributed to the high quality of healthcare services in the country.

Have you read?

• How can we deliver sustainable healthcare? 3 industry leaders lay out solutions 
• Governments urged to invest in healthcare systems despite global economic uncertainty
• Here’s how countries compare on healthcare expenditure and life expectancy

Japan’s initiative for global health

With such a history and system of insured health care, Japan issued the Basic Policy for Peace and Health in 2015, and based on its own experience, has shown a commitment to strengthen the necessary support for mainstreaming universal health coverage in the international community.

At the G7 Ise-Shima Summit and G7 Kobe Health Ministers’ Meeting held in 2016, Japan became the first G7 country to set the promotion of UHC as a major theme at the summit-level meeting. Japan expressed its commitment to play a leading role in international discussions by supporting the establishment of universal health coverage in Africa, Asia, and other regions in cooperation with the international community and organizations.

Subsequently, in 2017, Japan co-hosted the high-level forum on UHC with the World Bank, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Government leaders from over 30 countries, as well as representatives and experts from international organizations, gathered to discuss how to promote universal health coverage in their countries, and adopted the Tokyo Declaration on UHC, which includes a commitment to accelerate efforts to achieve UHC by 2030. 

In May 2022, the Kishida administration set forth its new Global Health Strategy based on the experience of responding to the spread of COVID-19. Placing the achievement of more resilient, equitable and sustainable UHC at the centre of Japan’s international cooperation in the health sector, the strategy provides guidelines for efforts to build a global health architecture and strengthen health systems to prepare for future public health crises, including pandemics.

https://cdn.jwplayer.com/players/haJ55Xtl-ncRE1zO6.html

Corporate contribution to the realization of UHC

Ajinomoto, a Japanese food company, has been developing a project to improve infant nutrition in Ghana since 2009, working with Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to promote baby nutritional supplements to reduce infant mortality due to malnutrition.

In addition, LEBER, Inc. has developed a healthcare app that can connect doctors and users anytime, anywhere, to solve the problems of people living in areas where access to healthcare is difficult. The app enables 24/7 remote doctor consultation via smartphone. With one of the largest networks of doctors in Japan, the app also functions as a physical condition management tool as well as a doctor consultation platform. 

Maintaining and operating the mechanism is a challenge

Universal health coverage is attracting attention as an excellent approach, but the key issue is how to maintain and operate the system once it has been realized. Securing an operating budget and training human resources with expertise are essential to making UHC sustainable.

Even in Japan, a leading universal health coverage country, there is a growing view that the current health insurance system is at risk of collapsing in the future due to increasing medical costs associated with the rapid aging of the population and sluggish income growth caused by slow economic growth. If Japan is to further develop its healthcare functions, there is an urgent need to rebuild a sustainable healthcare system that can respond to changes in the demographic structure. To address this challenge, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has launched Health Care 2035 to discuss a paradigm shift in Japan’s healthcare, with the aim to achieve this by 2035.

Universal health coverage as the foundation for a sustainable society

It will soon be three years since the first outbreak of COVID-19. The virus has repeatedly mutated, with numerous infectious outbreaks and convergence cycles that have taken a long-term toll on the economies of countries and peoples around the world. We have become acutely aware that health issues are closely linked to economic and social issues, and the importance of Sustainable Development Goal number 3 – good health and well-being – has also been highlighted once again.

What is noteworthy about Goal 3, which is comprised of 13 targets, is that the achievement of UHC is stated as being related to all of the targets and as the foundation of the entire goal. The need for universal health coverage has become even more urgent, not only to correct the world’s increasingly pronounced health disparities, but as a foundation for economic and social stability and global health security.

Developed countries have extended assistance to people in developing countries to ensure that they have access to adequate healthcare services. On the other hand, the pandemic has also pushed the healthcare systems of developed countries to the brink of collapse. In 2023, the G7 summit is scheduled to take place in Hiroshima. In conjunction with the summit, Health Ministers’ Meeting will be held in Nagasaki in May. As the chair, Japan is expected to lead the discussion on overcoming this crises and rebuilding cooperation among countries.

Article link: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/12/mainstreaming-universal-health-coverage-with-japan-at-the-helm-as-a-leading-health-nation/?utm_campaign=social_video_2023&utm_content=28517_Japan_universal_healthcare&utm_medium=social_video&utm_source=linkedin&utm_term=1_1

The utility-scale quantum computer will be housed in RPI’s Voorhees Computing Center, a former cathedral.

There’s a chapel in Troy, New York much like any other, with colorful stained-glass windows, beautifully crafted spaces — and an ornate chandelier. But this chandelier is unique. It’s the heart of a quantum computing system.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) today broke ground on the first IBM Quantum System One to be housed on a college campus in the US. The new computer, which is expected to be online by early 2024, is part of the new Curtis Priem Quantum Constellation. The installation will be part of the new center for collaborative research funded by Priem, which is hiring additional faculty to get the most out of the quantum system. Priem, a graduate of RPI, cofounded the processor company NVIDIA in 1993.

The quantum computer is inside RPI’s Voorhees Computing Center (VCC), which was originally built as a chapel in 1933. RPI took it over as a facility building in the 1960s and transformed it into the current computing center in 1979. George Low, the RPI President at the time, called the VCC “the most unique computing center in the world.”

And it’s about to stand out even more. The new IBM quantum computer will be housed next to stained glass windows, glistening in a kaleidoscope of colors below gothic-style archways. It’s safe to say there are few other computer systems, quantum or otherwise, that have such a serene setting.

An event celebrating the groundbreaking took place at RPI’s Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center theater, just down the road from the eventual location of the computer. In attendance were several leaders at IBM and RPI, including Marty Schmidt, RPI’s president, Darío Gil, senior vice president and director of IBM Research, John E. Kelly III, the chair of RPI’s Board of Trustees and former director of IBM Research, as well as Curtis Priem, who also serves the RPI Board of Trustees vice chair.

The greater Albany, New York area has a long history of being involved in building the future of computing, with many of the biggest breakthroughs in semiconductor design and productionhappening along the Hudson River.

“Our new quantum computational center will benefit the Capital Region and the State of New York by dramatically enhancing our area’s research capabilities,” Schmidt said recently. “We look forward to working with our partners in the region to transform the Hudson River Valley into ‘Quantum Valley.’”

IBM Quantum System One Groundbreaking Celebration at RPI

Article link: https://research.ibm.com/blog/rpi-quantum-system-one

A new chip prototype from IBM Research’s lab in California, long in the making, has the potential to upend how and where AI is used efficiently.

We’re in the midst of a Cambrian explosion in AI. Over the last decade, AI has gone from theory and small tests to enterprise-scale use cases. But the hardware used to run AI systems, although increasingly powerful, was not designed with today’s AI in mind. As AI systems scale, the costs skyrocket. And Moore’s Law, the theory that the density of circuits in processors would double every two years, has slowed.

But new research out of IBM Research’s lab in Almaden, California, nearly two decades in the making, has the potential to drastically shift how we can efficiently scale up powerful AI hardware systems.

Since the birth of the semiconductor industry, computer chips have primarily followed the same basic structure, where the processing units and the memory storing the information to be processed are stored discretely. While this structure has allowed for simpler designs that have been able to scale well over the decades, it’s created what’s called the von Neumann bottleneck, where it takes time and energy to continually shuffle data back and forth between memory, processing, and any other devices within a chip. The work by IBM Research’s Dharmendra Modha and his colleagues aims to change this, taking inspiration from how the brain computes. “It forges a completely different path from the von Neumann architecture,” according to Modha.

Over the last eight years, Modha has been working on a new type of digital AI chip for neural inference, which he calls NorthPole. It’s an extension of TrueNorth, the last brain-inspired chip that Modha worked on prior to 2014. In tests on the popular ResNet-50 image recognition and YOLOv4 object detection models, the new prototype device has demonstrated higher energy efficiency, higher space efficiency, and lower latency than any other chip currently on the market, and is roughly 4,000 times faster than TrueNorth.

The first promising set of results from NorthPole chips were published today in Science. NorthPole is a breakthrough in chip architecture that delivers massive improvements in energy, space, and time efficiencies, according to Modha. Using the ResNet-50 model as a benchmark, NorthPole is considerably more efficient than common 12-nm GPUs and 14-nm CPUs. (NorthPole itself is built on 12 nm node processing technology.) In both cases, NorthPole is 25 times more energy efficient, when it comes to the number of frames interpreted per joule of power required. NorthPole also outperformed in latency, as well as space required to compute, in terms of frames interpreted per second per billion transistors required. According to Modha, on ResNet-50, NorthPole outperforms all major prevalent architectures — even those that use more advanced technology processes, such as a GPU implemented using a 4 nm process.

How does it manage to compute with so much efficiency than existing chips? One of the biggest differences with NorthPole is that all of the memory for the device is on the chip itself, rather than connected separately. Without that von Neumann bottleneck, the chip can carry out AI inferencing considerably faster than other chips already on the market. NorthPole was fabricated with a 12-nm node process, and contains 22 billion transistors in 800 square millimeters. It has 256 cores and can perform 2,048 operations per core per cycle at 8-bit precision, with potential to double and quadruple the number of operations with 4-bit and 2-bit precision, respectively. “It’s an entire network on a chip,” Modha said.

“Architecturally, NorthPole blurs the boundary between compute and memory,” Modha said. “At the level of individual cores, NorthPole appears as memory-near-compute and from outside the chip, at the level of input-output, it appears as an active memory.” This makes NorthPole easy to integrate in systems and significantly reduces load on the host machine.

But the biggest advantage of NorthPole is also a constraint: it can only easily pull from the memory it has onboard. All of the speedups that are possible on the chip would be undercut if it had to access information from another place. Via an approach called scale-out, NorthPole can actually support larger neural networks by breaking them down into smaller sub-networks that fit within NorthPole’s model memory, and connecting these sub-networks together on multiple NorthPole chips. So while there is ample memory on a NorthPole (or collectively on a set of NorthPoles) for many of the models that would be useful for specific applications, this chip is not meant to be a jack of all trades. “We can’t run GPT-4 on this, but we could serve many of the models enterprises need,” Modha said . “And, of course, NorthPole is only for inferencing.”

This efficacy means that the device also doesn’t need bulky liquid-cooling systems to run — fans and heat sinks are more than enough — meaning that it could be deployed in some rather small spaces.

Potential applications for NorthPole

While research into the NorthPole chip is still ongoing, its structure lends itself to emerging AI use cases, as well as more well-established ones.

In testing, NorthPole team focused primarily on computer vision-related uses, in part because funding for the project came from the U.S. Department of Defense. Some of the primary applications in consideration were detection, image segmentation, and video classification. But it was also tested in other arenas, such as natural language processing (on the encoder-only BERT model) and speech recognition (on the DeepSpeech2 model). The team is currently exploring mapping decoder-only large language models to NorthPole scale-out systems.

When you think of these AI tasks, all sorts of fantastical use cases spring to mind, from autonomous vehicles, to robotics, digital assistants, or spatial computing. Many sorts of edge applications that require massive amounts of data processing in real time could be well-suited for NorthPole. For example, it could potentially be the sort of device that’s needed to move autonomous vehicles from machines that require set maps and routes to operate on a small scale, to ones that can think and react to the rare edge-case situations that make navigating in the real world so challenging even for proficient human drivers. These sorts of edge-cases are the exact sweet spot for future NorthPole applications. NorthPole could enable satellites that monitor agriculture and manage wildlife populations, monitor vehicle and freight for safer and less congested roads, operate robots safely, and detect cyber threats for safer businesses.

What’s next

This is just the start of the work for Modha on NorthPole. The current state of the art for CPUs is 3 nm — and IBM itself is already years into research on 2 nm nodes. That means there’s a handful of generations of chip processing technologies NorthPole could be implemented on, in addition to fundamental architectural innovations, to keep finding efficiency and performance gains.

But for Modha, this is just one important milestone along a continuum that has dominated the last 19 years of his professional career. He’s been working on digital brain-inspired chips throughout that time, knowing that the brain is the most energy-efficient processor we know, and searching for ways to replicate that digitally. TrueNorth was fully inspired by the structures of neurons in the brain — and had as many digital “synapses” in it as the brain of a bee. But sitting on a park bench in 2015 in San Francisco, Modha said he was thinking through his work to date. He had the belief that there was something in marrying the best of traditional processing devices with the structure of processing in the brain, where memory and processing are interspersed throughout the brain. The answer was “brain-inspired computing, with silicon speed,” according to Modha.

Over the next eight years, Modha and his colleagues were single-minded and hermetic in their goal of turning this vision into a reality. Toiling inconspicuously in Almaden, the team didn’t give any lectures or publish any papers on their work, until this year. Each person brought different skills and perspective yet everyone collaborated so that as a whole the team’s contribution was much greater than the sum of the parts. Now, the plan is to show what NorthPole could do, while exploring how to translate the designs into smaller chip production processes and further exploring the architectural possibilities.

This work stemmed from simple ideas — how can we make computers that work like the brain — and after years of fundamental research, has come up with an answer. Something that is really only possible today at a place like IBM Research, where there is the time and space to explore the big questions in computing, and where they can take us. “NorthPole is a faint representation of the brain in the mirror of a silicon wafer,” Modha said.

Article link: https://research.ibm.com/blog/northpole-ibm-ai-chip

The new toolkit already includes links to an open-source database that is “dedicated to indexing the collective history of harms or near harms realized in the real world by the deployment of artificial intelligence systems. Like similar databases in aviation and computer security, the AI Incident Database aims to learn from experience so we can prevent or mitigate bad outcomes,” according to the website. Examples of such incidents include autonomous vehicles hitting pedestrians and faulty facial recognition systems, among others.

Other aids that are in the works as part of the Pentagon’s responsible AI implementation effort include an executive dashboard laying out project goals; incident response guidance including an interactive web application for end-user auditing; an acquisition guide for potential buyers of artificial intelligence products; and a senior leadership guide for reviewing program managers overseeing AI projects.

There’s also a “use case repository” in development that will include a rundown of artificial intelligence use cases, and a tool to help organizations define and establish roles and responsibilities for AI projects. The Pentagon recently established Task Force Lima to look at a slew of potential use cases for generative AI.

A “human bias red-teaming toolkit” and a bias bounty guidebook are also expected to be released.

In July, the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) issued a call for “discovery papers” in its search for vendors to set up a new bounty program.

“The DoD is interested in supporting grassroots/crowdsourced red-teaming efforts to ensure that their AI-enabled systems — and the contexts in which they run — are safe, secure, reliable, and equitable. Bias — the systematic errors that an AI system generates due to incorrect assumptions of various types, is a threat to achieving this outcome. Therefore, as part of this priority, the current call seeks industry partners to help develop and run an AI bias bounty program to algorithmically audit models, facilitate experimentation with addressing identified risks, and ensure the systems are equitable given their particular deployment context,” according to a notice posted on the CDAO’s Tradewind website.

The Pentagon expects vendors to have equipped the department and its components with the tools needed to organize and run their own bias bounty programs in the future, according to the notice.

Meanwhile, the CDAO this week also launched of a new digital on-demand learning platform to boost the AI know-how of the Defense Department’s military and civilian personnel by providing them access to MIT’s Horizon library, which will offer “bite-sized learning assets” related to artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, 5G, edge computing, cybersecurity and big data analytics, according to a release.

The capability — which will be provided through the Air and Space Forces’ Digital University — is intended to “foster a baseline understanding of AI systems and other emerging technologies,” CDAO chief Craig Martell said in a statement. “This resource demonstrates to the DoD workforce how they fit into the future of these advancements and further enables their adoption throughout the Department.”

In a statement, Kathleen Kennedy, senior director of MIT Horizon and executive director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, said: “The DoD is on a historical journey of building a digital workforce. When it comes to AI and emerging technologies, it is really important that their employees are all speaking the same language.”

To use the library, DOD personnel should create an account via the digitalu.af.mil website using their .mil email address, and search for “MIT Horizon,” according to the release.

Article link: https://defensescoop.com/2023/11/16/pentagon-developing-repository-to-document-when-ai-goes-wrong/?

By STEVE KELMANNOVEMBER 13, 2023

COMMENTARY | NASA’s Jennifer Elkins is an example of how senior civil servants can affect change in large organizations.

We often think about innovations in organizations as being driven either from the top or the bottom — a top leader who inspires or drives change, or young new employees with a fire in their belly. In a Kennedy School executive education program for GS-15s in which I just taught, I got to know a woman who was leading an innovation effort from neither of those positions, but as a non-supervisory procurement analyst at NASA.

Jennifer Elkins came to NASA headquarters two years ago to take charge of a cross-agency Integrated Product Team to promote innovation at all NASA centers. Before an executive education program starts, I always read through the biographies of all the participants, to see what kinds of interests they have and whether there are any common connections (often I know some other folks at their agency). In her bio, Jennifer described herself as working on something called the “acquisition innovation launchpad,” which she described as ”providing avenues for managed risk-taking through the submission, review, prioritization, approval, and measurement of agency testbed efforts submitted by Innovation Champions from across the enterprise.” I immediately told myself I wanted to talk, and after I was done doing my teaching in the program during the first week, I asked her if we could meet after her classes one day were done. We ended up sitting down together for several hours, and it was time well-spent.

Elkins works as a program manager in NASA headquarters. For many years, she worked in Defense Department, with her last job there as Director of Acquisition and Contracts Policy for Missile Defense Agency. Her first exposure to innovation was working as an Army civilian on a contract under the Small Business Innovation Research program, and she got hooked. When the Army got the authority to do “other transactions,” which allowed freedom from many procurement regulations, the senior procurement executive was looking for somebody to work on this for him, and she volunteered. She worked on establishing an Army-wide integrated product team with representatives from a large number of Army installations to work on innovations.

At NASA she successfully competed for a job to coordinate innovation activities at all the NASA centers. Since arriving, she has eliminated stovepiped meetings of the various functionals in her IPT — the way many government IPT’s unfortunately operate — and replaced this with more brainstorming sessions where IPT members talk with each other. She has focused on use of new contract types and new incentive arrangements to improve contractor performance.

One thing that made an impression on me was that she said that her most-important source for innovative ideas was something called the periodic table of acquisition innovations, a document developed through a partnership between ACT-IAC and the Chief Acquisition Officers Council and first published in 2020. The table lists about 20 different innovative techniques, such as reverse industry days and (a long-time favorite of mine) using challenges (also called contests) as a way to bring forth innovations in the procurement system. Wilkins also adopted the emphasis in the periodic table on pre-RFP market research that existing procurement regs call for but has often in reality been a formalistic paper exercise. The same periodic table Jennifer noted also caught the eye of the White House in a procurement innovation update published a few days ago.

Jennifer is an example of someone I’ve repeatedly encountered in dealing with government folks, but which gets little attention — civil servants trying to innovate and make a difference. My hat off to her and those like her.

Article link: https://www.nextgov.com/ideas/2023/11/driving-innovation-middle/391974/

The NATO Communications and Information Agency is surveying industry.

BYJON HARPER NOVEMBER 14, 2023

The NATO Communications and Information Agency is surveying industry for artificial intelligence technology that can enhance service delivery and workflows.

The agency is conducting market research to inform plans to enhance its support capabilities by implementing an “AI cognitive agent platform” within the alliance’s Enterprise Service Operations Centre (ESOC), according to a special noticeposted on Sam.gov.

The far-reaching organization, which includes 3,000 civilians and military staff spread across 29 sites throughout Europe and North America, provides a wide array of support and services for the alliance related to IT, cybersecurity, command and control, business application and other mission areas, according to its website.

“The purpose of this project is for the NCI Agency to revolutionize its support operations by introducing an AI cognitive agent. This technology will automate routine tasks, streamline ticket management and empower [Level 1] personnel to address complex issues efficiently ensuring a high level of service delivery,” according to an annex listing requirements and other information about the initiative.

The organization is looking for commercially available AI tools to help with a wide range of tasks including process workflows, password management, ticket management and escalation, knowledge base integration, notification template creation, and reporting and analytics, among others.

The tech is expected to be able to interact with humans, learn, and improve over time.

“The AI software cognitive agent will interact via a user interface with people with fast and meaningful responses, to solve problems or propose solutions through interactive conversations, with understanding of natural language and context, applying logic, and inferring implications,” according to the notice. “The AI agent will learn from operating procedures, historical chat sessions, Frequently Asked Questions and will have the capability to integrate new process instructions and workflows.”

Another aim of the initiative is to familiarize staff with emerging AI tech. To that end, the new software tool is expected to use natural language processing techniques and word searches to find relevant articles in the “knowledge base,” and make suggestions to agency personnel.

The agency plans to implement the technology through a one-year pilot on-premise in Mons, Belgium. Penetration and integration testing and user testing will be conducted before the capability is deployed, according to the notice.

The deadline for industry to respond to the notice is Dec. 15.

Plans for the new cognitive agent come amid a broader push by NATO and its member nations to acquire new artificial intelligence capabilities, which officials in charge of leading NATO transformation efforts have identified as being “of highest importance.”

Two years ago, the alliance formally adopted a new AI strategy and later established a review board to help govern the development and use of the technology.

Last year, the alliance unveiled a new Strategic Concept that highlighted the need to focus on emerging and disruptive capabilities. It also launched the Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA), which is intended to provide long-term investments in startups and other entities developing key technologies that the alliance is interested in, such as artificial intelligence, autonomy, big-data processing and others.

Earlier this year, MITRE began steering two new artificial intelligence-focused “exploratory teams” for NATO’s Information Systems and Technology Panel to inform its biannual AI strategy update.

Article link: https://defensescoop.com/2023/11/14/nato-on-the-hunt-for-new-ai-cognitive-agent/?

“We struggle sometimes to anticipate the way that real users interact with technologies,” U.S. Central Command CTO Schuyler Moore said.

BYBRANDI VINCENT

NOVEMBER 14, 2023

U.S. Central Command’s leadership is moving deliberately to get end users of new artificial intelligence capabilities involved as early as possible in the development of those emerging tools, according to Centcom’s Chief Technology Officer Schuyler Moore.

“The earlier that you can get the actual human in close to a realistic environment, the better you will be equipped to speak with authenticity and in quantitative terms about how AI is being integrated in a responsible and ethical way,” she said Tuesday at Intel’s public sector summit.

Broadly, Central Command — which is responsible for U.S. military operations in the Middle East — is considered one of the Defense Department’s early AI adopters. The hub has deployed high-tech AI that enables computer vision, pattern detection, and decision support for intelligence, reconnaissance and other missions. 

The Pentagon has produced and released guidance and resources to inform what it has deemed “responsible AI” use across all components, with an eye toward deploying more of these types of tools in the future.

“We set a lot of expectations of — ‘for responsible and ethical AI, you’ll perform in XYZ ways.’ But the only way that you will be able to measure whether or not a model or capability performs in XYZ ways is if you put it in the hand of the person who is supposed to actually use it. We struggle sometimes to anticipate the way that real users interact with technologies,” Moore said.

Her team has learned in their efforts that the ways that military users interact with new capabilities in testing phases “matters significantly,” she added.

Sometimes in the software space, developers will try to mitigate risks identified in new products by taking away users’ access to solve the problems that have been identified.

But in Moore’s view, “assumed risk can actually be reduced by introducing the user in as realistic of an environment as possible into an earlier stage of development.” Not doing so, she said, could result in building advanced models that do not take into account how the user engages with the technology or the network capacity and other data they have available. 

“So, you actually introduce more risk by removing the user and saying, ‘We’re going to fix everything before we get it to you guys.’ And so, as a combatant command sometimes we try and make sure that we’re making that point clear that this older model perhaps for hardware, of being developed in a silo and it goes into these test labs before you throw over the wall to the user — it’s not necessarily appropriate for software, AI or otherwise. The earlier you can inject realism, both in terms of your user testing and in terms of the environment, will reduce your risk,” Moore said.

“And so we are trying to beat the drum on that. As a combatant command, we are raising our hand to say, ‘We will be the integration testbed for the department. You can push things out to us and we will have realistic data, we will have realistic users and realistic environments that will improve the quality and actually de-risk for the entire department what might otherwise remain more of a wild product until it actually gets transferred to users,’” she explained.

Article link: https://defensescoop.com/2023/11/14/centcom-aims-to-be-pentagons-ai-integration-testbed/?

watsonx.governance helps organizations:

– Manage AI to meet upcoming safety and transparency regulations and policies worldwide – a “nutrition label” for AI

– Proactively detect and mitigate risk, monitoring for fairness, bias, drift, and new LLM metrics

– Manage, monitor, and govern AI models from IBM, open source communities, and other model providers

Nov 14, 2023

ARMONK, N.Y., Nov 14, 2023/PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE:IBM) today announced that watsonx.governance will be generally available in early December to help businesses shine a light on AI models and eliminate the mystery around the data going in, and the answers coming out.

While generative AI, powered by Large Language Models (LLM) or Foundation Models, offers many use cases for businesses, it also poses new risks and complexities, including training data scraped from corners of the internet that cannot be validated as fair and accurate, all the way to a lack of explainable outputs. Watsonx.governance provides organizations with the toolkit they need to manage risk, embrace transparency, and anticipate compliance with future AI-focused regulation.

As businesses today are looking to innovate with AI, deploying a mix of LLMs from tech providers and open sources communities, watsonxenables them to manage, monitor and govern models from wherever they choose.

“Company boards and CEOs are looking to reap the rewards from today’s more powerful AI models, but the risks due to a lack of transparency and inability to govern these models have been holding them back,” said Kareem Yusuf, Ph.D, Senior Vice President, Product Management and Growth, IBM Software. “Watsonx.governance is a one-stop-shop for businesses that are struggling to deploy and manage both LLM and ML models, giving businesses the tools, they need to automate AI governance processes, monitor their models, and take corrective action, all with increased visibility. Its ability to translate regulations into enforceable policies will only become more essential for enterprises as new AI regulation takes hold worldwide.”

IBM Consulting has also expanded their strategic expertise to help clients scale responsible AI with both automated model governance and organizational governance encompassing people, process and technology from IBM and strategic partners. IBM consultants have deep skills in establishing AI ethics boards, organizational culture and accountability, training, regulatory and risk management, and mitigating cybersecurity threats, all using human-centric design.

Watsonx.governance is one of three software products in the IBM watsonx AI and data platform, along with a set of AI assistants, designed to help enterprises scale and accelerate the impact of AI. The platform includes the watsonx.ai next-generation enterprise studio for AI builders and the watsonx.data open, hybrid, and governed data store. The company also recently announced intellectual property protection for its for IBM-developed watsonx models.

About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. More than 4,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

Visit www.ibm.com for more information.

Contacts:

Amy Angelini
alangeli@us.ibm.com

Zach Bishop
zachery.bishop@ibm.com

SOURCE IBM

Article link: https://newsroom.ibm.com/2023-11-14-IBM-Unveils-watsonx-governance-to-Help-Businesses-Governments-Govern-and-Build-Trust-in-Generative-AI?

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joweiler_dod-data-analytics-and-ai-adoption-strategy-activity-7130205134965370880-fwg0?