Artificial intelligence continues to gain traction, and advances are likely to continue into 2021. There are several advances in technology that will take hold during 2021, including facial recognition, Edge AI, cybersecurity, and counterintelligence, along with robotics.
Facial Recognition
For nearly a decade, your fingerprint was the dominant source of recognition, but that changed over in 2020 and is likely to continue in 2021. Facial recognition will become a dominant AI-based contactless authentication technology. Facial recognition is a form of contactless authentication that seems to be needed in the age of COVID.
In 2021, enterprises will implement facial recognition for authentication in a growing range of internal and customer-facing applications. Businesses will incorporate facial recognition into pictures and video for auto-tagging, query-by-image, and other such applications. Facial authentication will come at a price. Companies will need to be sensitive to avoid using the technology to inference identity, race, gender, and other attributes that will invade privacy, bias, or surveillance.
Cyber Security and Counter-Intelligence
Cybersecurity attacks and counterintelligence measures will need to protect the AI-driven markets. In 2021, AI professionals will need a methodology for detecting and dealing with adversarial threats to AI apps. Many AI developers will adopt the recently released Adversarial ML Threat Matrix, an open, extensible industry framework for classifying the most common adversarial tactics. This matrix will likely become a standard as a repository of hostile attacks and possible solutions. Cybersecurity share trading such as Crowdstrike has seen an upward trend in the stock markets as investors prepare for continued counterintelligence measures to cybersecurity issues.
Robotics and AI
Robots are becoming part of our daily lives. Small robots such as the disk-shaped vacuum known how to roam your house and deposit the dust when it's finished are just the beginning of human interaction with robots. Robotics are bringing AI into the mainstream. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, many formerly human functions will be handed off to robots. Robots have been trained to navigate, manage, and manipulate objects in complex real-world scenarios since they cannot get sick with a virus that can easily handle disinfection, which will become dominant robotics segments, with drones among the dominant platforms.
Edge Based AI
Edge-based AI allows artificial intelligence to interact where it's needed. Instead of functioning through the cloud, the AI is programmed at the source (such as a phone). In 2021, new programming will be fitted to hardware constraints of edge platforms. As the demand rises, programmers will search for techniques to find the most compact, efficient neural net structure for a specific AI inferencing task. Compression of AI algorithms down to their predictive essence will speed up most AI workloads to run on the microcontrollers embedded in edge devices.
The Bottom Line
Artificial intelligence will continue to perpetual in 2021. There will be several focus areas, with cybersecurity and countermeasures likely at the top of the heap. Artificial intelligence Edge, which advances AI down to the products that use the intelligence, will also continue to experience rising demand require further advances in programming. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, robots will likely continue to see further infiltration into human lives. Disinfection of sites and helping clean up virus origination areas will be the most pressing issues.