NTT DATA Technology Foresight 2021
LOOKING AHEAD: Technology Trends Driving Digital Innovation
NTT DATA R&D experts continuously analyze real-world case studies and other sources to identify the most significant technology and societal trends that we believe will drive change over the next three to ten years. The Information Society Trends provide our perspective on the evolution of society and business. The Technology Trends summarize our views on innovative technologies and their impact on the world.
Case Studies
- Domain-Specific BERT Innovates Business Use of NLP
- Data Collaboration Technology Securely Integrates Learning Data
Domain-Specific BERT Innovates Business Use of NLP
The performance of large-scale AI models has seen massive improvement, driving increased competition. As applications are being explored that leverage these models, the natural language processing (NLP) industry has begun to examine business applications for Financial BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), an AI language model developed by NTT DATA for the financial industry. Based on NTT BERT, which was built by NTT Laboratories using one of the largest Japanese-language text datasets in Japan, Financial BERT has learned financial text data uniquely compiled by NTT DATA. It eliminates the need to build domain-specific dictionaries or rules when analyzing documents that contain financial jargon or finance-specific context. This reduces the AI building process, while enabling highly accurate results.
We are now building an infrastructure upon which optimized versions of BERT (initially as Japanese-language models) can be easily created for domains beyond finance. It will handle processes ranging from domain-specific data collection to model building, enabling these models to be applied to business practices.
Data Collaboration Technology Securely Integrates Learning Data
As the value of data-driven business rises, the use of AI across industries is furthering optimization and creating new opportunities. Meanwhile, concerns over leaks of confidential information are also increasing, necessitating a security-backed data collection technology.
NTT DATA is working with academic institutions to develop a data collaboration technology that assures that each organization can keep its own information private while integrating with each other's data to build a highly accurate model. This technology works by converting confidential data to unreadable and neutral formats. This enables the creation of models that use learning data containing more variations and attributes, thereby producing more accurate AI models. The technology also uses fewer computing resources than other distributed learning methods, lowering the implementation threshold and making business application easier.
Cross-industry data use will only grow. NTT DATA is actively engaged in the development and deployment of collaboration technology to accelerate this trend and create new value.
*This data collaboration technology uses the results of a project consigned to the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).
Column
POST COVID-19 Accelerating Trends
The new coronavirus infection (COVID-19) continues to spread around the world, and many people who have been forced to change their behaviors are having a difficult time. So, what is the impact of COVID-19 on information technology (IT) trends? NTT DATA Technology Foresight provides a perspective of IT’s important role at this time, including the need to accelerate use of the latest advanced technologies, its growing influence in society, and the amplification of issues with IT adoption and usage under these circumstances.
