In 2018, artificial intelligence (AI) researchers made breakthroughs in accelerating machine learning training, anticipating cybersecurity attacks, and eliminating bias. The year 2019 promises to take society from today's "narrow" AI to a new era of "broad" AI, where developers, enterprises, and consumers will be able to fully take advantage of the technology's potential, according to a Thursday blog post from Dario Gil, COO and vice president of AI and quantum at IBM Research. "Broad AI will be characterized by the ability to learn and reason more broadly across tasks, to integrate information from multiple modalities and domains, all while being more explainable, secure, fair, auditable and scalable," Gil wrote in the post. SEE: IT leader's guide to the future of artificial intelligence (Tech Pro Research) Most of today's AI methods are fundamentally based on correlations, and lack a deep understanding of causality, Gil wrote. "Emerging causal inference methods allow us to infer causal structures from data, to efficiently select interventions to test putative causal relationships, and to make better decisions by leveraging knowledge of causal structure," he added.