After several years of research on machine learning algorithms running on oil and gas production data, Solution Seeker has developed a hierarchical neural network model that improves the predictive power for real-time production optimization. The model leverages the power of neural network learning algorithms combined with domain knowledge in the form of first principle physics and production system logic.

We're all having trouble sleeping, and at least one group of researchers in the Netherlands believes it's because we're not cuddling enough. That's the thinking behind Somnox, a breathing robot that's designed to nestle in your arms and make you think that you've got a special friend over. At the same time, the unit will offer up soothing sounds, like a heartbeat, lullabies or nature sounds, depending on your preferences. The device is also stuffed full with sensors that, as yet, have yet to be activated, but it's thought that the system will eventually offer sleep tracking as well. When that information is crunched by the Somnox servers, it's plausible that you'll be given insights on how to sleep better than you would otherwise.

A group of developers are attempting to revive the Zano drone - one of Kickstarter's most notorious failures. The handheld quadcopter raised £2.3m from more than 12,000 backers on the crowdfunding platform before the project imploded in 2015. The resulting scandal prompted a probe that found fault with all involved. The Zano Camera project is one of several initiatives on show at the CES expo that make use of seized assets from failed crowdfunding campaigns. The person leading the effort is Vernon Kerswell, chief executive of Extreme Fliers, a London-based micro drone manufacturer.

While the job losses generate the most interest and headlines, the losses only tell part of the story. Dig a little bit deeper into the hype cycle and you'll see Gartner also predicts AI will create 2.3 million jobs by 2020, driving a net gain of 500,000 new jobs. The question is no longer whether AI will fundamentally change the workplace. The true question is how companies can successfully use AI in ways that enables, not replaces, the human workforce, helping to make humans faster, more efficient and more productive. Andy Peart is chief strategy and marketing officer at Barcelona, Spain-based Artificial Solutions, a global specialist in natural language interaction.

In addition to autonomous vehicles crawling the cities without drivers, we should start getting ready for the sky to be taken over by robot chauffeurs. One of the companies working on future air taxis is Germany-based Volocopter. Its 18-rotored human-sized drone took flight at Intel's CES keynote and was on display at the Las Vegas Convention Center. So naturally, we asked to sit in it. Volocopter began its journey to autonomous air taxis in 2013 and has made some impressive progress in the past four years.

The field of Multi-Agent System (MAS) is an active area of research within Artificial Intelligence, with an increasingly important impact in industrial and other real-world applications. Within a MAS, autonomous agents interact to pursue personal interests and/or to achieve common objectives. Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) have emerged as one of the prominent agent architectures to govern the agents' autonomous behavior, where both algorithms and communication models are driven by the structure of the specific problem. During the last decade, several extensions to the DCOP model have enabled them to support MAS in complex, real-time, and uncertain environments. This survey aims at providing an overview of the DCOP model, giving a classification of its multiple extensions and addressing both resolution methods and applications that find a natural mapping within each class of DCOPs. The proposed classification suggests several future perspectives for DCOP extensions, and identifies challenges in the design of efficient resolution algorithms, possibly through the adaptation of strategies from different areas.

We propose expected policy gradients (EPG), which unify stochastic policy gradients (SPG) and deterministic policy gradients (DPG) for reinforcement learning. Inspired by expected sarsa, EPG integrates (or sums) across actions when estimating the gradient, instead of relying only on the action in the sampled trajectory. For continuous action spaces, we first derive a practical result for Gaussian policies and quadric critics and then extend it to an analytical method for the universal case, covering a broad class of actors and critics, including Gaussian, exponential families, and reparameterised policies with bounded support. For Gaussian policies, we show that it is optimal to explore using covariance proportional to the matrix exponential of the scaled Hessian of the critic with respect to the actions. EPG also provides a general framework for reasoning about policy gradient methods, which we use to establish a new general policy gradient theorem, of which the stochastic and deterministic policy gradient theorems are special cases. Furthermore, we prove that EPG reduces the variance of the gradient estimates without requiring deterministic policies and with little computational overhead. Finally, we show that EPG outperforms existing approaches on six challenging domains involving the simulated control of physical systems.

MOSCOW – Russia said Tuesday that a recent series of drone attacks on its military bases in Syria would have required assistance from a country possessing satellite navigation technology -- a statement that appeared to be aimed at the United States. Russia's Defense Ministry said its forces repelled a series of drone attacks Saturday on the Hemeimeem air base and a naval facility in Tartus, adding that out of the 13 drones involved, seven were shot down and six were forced to land without inflicting any damage. Without blaming any specific country, the ministry said data for the attacks could only have been obtained "from one of the countries that possesses know-how in satellite navigation." In Tuesday's statement, it noted a "strange coincidence" of a U.S. military intelligence plane flying over the Mediterranean near the two Russian bases at the moment of the attack. The Pentagon denied any involvement.

Consumers who own in-home digital voice assistant devices are using their smartphones less often for entertainment and online purchasing, according to an online survey of 21,000 consumers in 19 countries by Accenture. The survey revealed that two-thirds of consumers who own digital voice assistants – powered by early stage artificial intelligence – said they use their smartphones for fewer applications in the home since acquiring the devices. Nearly two-thirds of these owners said they use their smartphones less for entertainment, and more than half use them less for online purchasing and general information searches. "Digital voice assistant devices are challenging smartphones as the central hub for all activities in the home," said David Sovie, global managing director of Accenture's High Tech business. "These low-cost devices deliver valuable and practical benefits and are relatively easy to use, and their rapidly growing popularity is one of the most striking trends in the high-tech industry."

As 2018 begins Supply Management rounds up some predictions for the year ahead. Brexit's questions will start to be answered: While 2017 was the year of Brexit uncertainty, 2018 will be the year where things start to change. Procurement teams will need to start proactively helping their businesses deal with that change and minimise exposure to contract and legal risk, says Sam De Silva, partner at law firm CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang. Procurement can no longer be a discrete and siloed function, says Shivani Govil, VP solutions management at SAP Ariba. "In the year ahead, companies will move away from niche offerings that address pieces of the procurement puzzle towards integrated platforms." Automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence will continue to be buzzwords for the year ahead.