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12/11/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 12/11/2024 15:17

Surfing, customizing AI models, and really big microscopesAIClimate and SustainabilityQuantum SafeSemiconductors

12 Nov 2024
News
3 minute read

Surfing, customizing AI models, and really big microscopes

Welcome to The Short, IBM Research's weekly recap of the latest innovations in AI, quantum computing, semiconductors, and the cloud. If you're liking what you see here, be sure to sign up for earlier access on LinkedIn.

In this week's edition:

Serving customized AI models at scale with LoRA

Fine-tuning large language models on specialized data the traditional way can involve updating billons to trillions of weights. Low-rank adaptation, or LoRA, offers a shortcut. With LoRA, you change only a tiny subset of the base model's weights, creating a plug-in module (also called a LoRA!) that gives your model domain-specific expertise at inference time. Like custom bits for a multi-head screwdriver, LoRAs can be swapped in and out of the base model to give it specialized capabilities. Here are several ways IBM Research is innovating with LoRA to make it easier to customize and serve AI models at scale.

From surf to satellites: Campbell Watson is bringing AI to Earth science

It's rare that passions can inspire professions, but that's exactly what happened with IBM Research scientist Campbell Watson. Growing up near Melbourne, Australia, he became an avid surfer from a young age. Spending so much time out on the waves led to a love of learning how the oceans, and our climate, works. This led to a career in Earth sciences, and at IBM Research, Watson now works on advanced models of the atmosphere, including IBM Research and NASA's newest Prithvi WxC model, that aim to help us better understand the changing world we live in. And he still finds time to meet up with his childhood surfing buddies from time to time. Learn more about Campbell and his work below.

What a penny looks like through an electron microscope

Did you know that a U.S. penny actually has two images of Abraham Lincoln on it? Everyone can see his profile on the front, but in the image of the Lincoln Memorial on the reverse, there's also the tiny statue of him sitting inside. You can just about see it with a regular microscope, but it's super easy to spot with a scanning electron microscope (SEM), if you have one lying around.

Behind the doors of an anechoic chamber at IBM Research Yorktown, shielded from subtle vibrations, research engineer John Ott operates a SEM that lets scientists inspect the surfaces of tiny, sensitive circuit components. With this machine, he can detect minuscule imperfections in chips that can help researchers designing tomorrow's processors see where potential flaws in their designs are. A standard optical microscope can tend to magnify objects between four and 100 times what we can see with our eyes alone. The SEM in Ott's lab can visualize objects 50,000 times smaller. Watch the video below to take a tour through Ott's lab.

PBS NOVA: Decoding the Universe: Quantum

On the latest episode of Decoding the Universe, PBS NOVA takes a trip to the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. Check out IBM Quantum's Jay Gambetta and Olivia Lanes as they discuss the latest on qubit development, quantum computing hardware and take a closer look at the IBM Quantum System Two.

Managing cryptography with CBOMkit

There's a growing reality of the threat that quantum computing could have on cryptography. In response, IBM Research has developed and open-sourced CBOMkit to help developers actively manage cryptographic assets in their projects by generating, visualizing, analyzing and storing inventories using a cryptographic bill of materials (CBOM). This toolkit will help developers get get familiar with CBOM, identifying cryptographic assets in their code and dependencies, and providing CBOMs of their projects and applications to users.

AI Hardware Forum 2024

The 2024 AI Hardware Forum is approaching on November 18. Hosted at the T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, we will come together to discuss what's next in foundation models and the challenges in designing AI hardware to support complex and multi-modal workloads.

IBM announces the winners of the 2024 Pat Goldberg competition

IBM Research recently concluded our annual Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Award competition. This competition recognizes a small number of outstanding papers spanning the broad breadth of IBM Research including computer science and AI, mathematical sciences, physical sciences and quantum computing. Papers published in 2023 were eligible, and this year, three papers were selected as winners, and four as honorable mentions.

Research Roundup

Highlighting new publications from IBM researchers that we liked the sound of:

This week's big question

What would you like to customize an AI model to be able to do?

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