How should I avoid someone patenting technology in my paper/poster? I am working on a paper in the field of AI. I've developed a new technology that allows many state of the art benchmarks to be improved on. I want to make sure that when I publish the paper, anyone/company that wants to use the technology can do so free of charge with no strings attached. My fear is that someone will patent the work soon after I publish the paper and prevent this from happening. Should I patent the technology myself before publishing? Is there a better solution?
You need not patent your invention. The requirements of a patent are that it is new, useful and non-obvious. To another person your published work is considered prior art. If someone else tried to patent your work the patent office would reject it as anticipated. 

Of course this assumes the patent office finds your work. The inventor could fail to disclose it and the patent office could fail to find it in search. In such a case you can typically submit your work to the relavent patent offices to have the patent/patent application invalidated/rejected.