IEEE Computer Society, the computing industry's leading source for technology information and career development, believes that blockchain technology, among others, will reach adoption next year.

In its technology predictions for 2017, IEEE Computer Society sees Industrial IoT; self-driving cars; artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cognitive computing; 5G, blockchain; hyper-converged systems; accelerators; disaggregated memory – fabric-attached nonvolatile memory (nvm); and sensors and edge compute to reach adoption in the forthcoming year.

“While known as the technology behind Bitcoin, Blockchain has far more disruptive uses, potentially changing the way in which we implement processes like voting, financial transactions, title and ownership, anti-counterfeiting, and digital rights managements, securing these processes without the need (and bottleneck) of a central authority”, it said.

Technology trends that will reach adoption in 5 years (by 2022), include rebooting computing, human brain interface, Capabilities – Hardware protection, Exascale, NVM, Silicon Photonics, smart NICs, and Power Conservative Multicores.

Contributors to these predictions include Paolo Faraboschi, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Fellow; Eitan Frachtenberg, Data Scientist; Hironori Kasahara, IEEE Computer Society President-Elect; Phil Laplante, Professor, Penn State University; Dejan Milojicic, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Distinguished Technologist, and IEEE Computer Society Past President; and John Walz, IEEE Computer Society Past President.