Schneider Electric recently debuted factory upgrades that it claims make its Lexington, KY, factory the first smart factory in the United States. The factory uses technology like augmented reality to give workers live operational data about machines on the floor. And the change resulted in significant improvements in efficiency: a 90% reduction of paperwork and a 20% reduction in the mean repair time. Smart factory owners looking to make the next leap forward in the digital industrial revolution are turning to advanced technology like artificial intelligence and big data. Here are six smart factory developments we're likely to see within the next year.

Modern artificial intelligence lacks a strong theoretical basis, and so it's often a shrug of the shoulders why it works at all (or, oftentimes, doesn't entirely work). One of the deepest mysteries of deep learning is one of its most brilliant successes, what's known as stochastic gradient descent. Stochasticity, the process of randomly picking out examples of data, has yielded breakthroughs in image recognition and other deep learning tasks. And now, one computer chip company thinks they may have a kind of machine for stochasticity, a chip whose power comes from randomness. It might not lead to a theory of why machine learning works, but it might lead to knew breakthroughs in what stochasticity can achieve.

Today HPE announced announced the deployment of a new supercomputer at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center for compute-intensive AI applications and bolstering research across engineering, science, and medicine. Called TX-GAIA (Green AI Accelerator), the new supercomputer converges HPC and AI to support workloads such as modeling and simulation and perform complex deep neural networks (DNN) and other machine learning training. It is based on the HPE Apollo 2000 system, which is purpose-built for HPC and optimized for AI, by integrating the latest Intel Xeon Scalable processors and NVIDIA GPU accelerators. At the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center, our mission is to solve the nation's hardest technical challenges by advancing computationally intensive science, engineering, and medicine," said Jeremy Kepner, head and founder, at MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center (LLSC). "By collaborating with HPC leaders like HPE, we are expanding technical capabilities to run emerging AI workloads in our supercomputer and accelerate innovation." The new supercomputer has a measured performance of 4.725 Petaflops and will be used to support research projects that will fuel innovation in weather forecasting, medical data analysis, autonomous systems, synthetic DNA design, and new materials and devices. Additionally, the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center's new system gets an AI performance boost, as measured by the computing speed required to perform DNNs, of a peak performance of 100 AI Petaflops. This will greatly accelerate the processing of deep neural networks and other compute-intensive AI workloads in order to improve training in areas such as image recognition, speech and natural language processing and computer vision. The TX-GAIA system comprises nearly 900 Intel processors and 900 Nvidia GPU accelerators. The new system is housed in a modular data center facility, co-developed with HPE and designed to speed deployment and reduce overall IT resources. It is located in Holyoke, Massachusetts, where it is powered by abundant green energy, and will go into production in the fall of 2019. We've seen strong industry demand for scalable performance to train higher volumes of AI that will advance science and engineering, and make breakthroughs across industries," said Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC and AI at HPE. "Our continued partnership with MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center extends the power of our HPC technologies to boost AI R&D and create new experiences."

Verizon's acquisition will include Jaunt's volumetric capture and machine learning technology. It's been a rocky couple of months for Jaunt XR. Late last year the software development startup conducted a series of layoffs to its staff as part of the companies transition from VR content to the development of AR technology with a focus on volumetric video capture. In November, the company began seeking buyers for its VR business and this past December company co-founder Arthur van Hoff announced his departure from the organization. Today, Jaunt announced the sale of all company assets to Verizon Communications Inc. as part of a new acquisition by the multimedia corporation.

The global threat of fraud shows no signs of slowing down. Losses related to fraud are valued at $14.7 billion, according to the most recent DataVisor Fraud Index Report. As fraudsters become increasingly aggressive, new global regulations and solutions are being deployed to keep consumers, merchants and banks safe. In the latest Digital Fraud Tracker, PYMNTS highlights the fraud trends and patterns that regulators are closely monitoring, as well as the solutions -- including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) -- that are being deployed to shift the anti-fraud effort from defense to offense. Fraud has become particularly problematic in the United Kingdom, where last year card-based losses increased by 19 percent compared to the previous year.

Researchers from Harvard University and MIT-IBM Watson Lab have created an AI-powered tool for spotting AI-generated text. Dubbed Giant Language Model Test Room (GLTR), the system aims to detect whether a specific piece of text was generated by a language model algorithm. You can give the tool a spin here. Don't miss Hard Fork Summit in Amsterdam With AI and natural language generation models already employed to produce fake news and spread misinformation, GLTR has the potential to distinguish machine generated text from human-written text to a non-expert reader. According to results shared by the researchers, GLTR improved the human detection-rate of fake text from 54 percent to 72 percent without any prior training.

As we look to the future of reinsurance, emerging technology innovations such as artificial intelligence will drive the digital transformation needed to harness new market opportunities and meet growing customer expectations. Reimagining cumbersome back-office workflows, attracting new talent, embracing software robots, and creating frictionless distribution channels are a reality, not a fad, as we gear up to service customers where and when they want to be served. With the Amazon Effect compounding higher customer expectations, revolutionizing how we do business is no longer an option. Leaders who define AI strategies that clearly articulate a strong business case for achieving corporate goals and delivering a better digital customer experience will leapfrog the competition and gain first mover advantage. On average, most Americans are living longer, healthier lives.

Last December in Germany, beautiful twins Amelia and Bianca were born. But, unlike her sister, Bianca's health is perilous. She was born with heart problems, is missing ribs and vertebrae and has only one kidney. She cannot breathe without the help of special medical equipment. The place Bianca calls home for now, Kinderhaus AtemReich in Munich, is the only one of its kind in the country. More typically, hospitals' intensive care units (ICUs) are long-term destinations for children with critical breathing issues.

Amazon rolled out more than a dozen new devices today in its annual hardware event atop a biodome at company headquarters in Seattle, including eyeglasses and a ring that speak with Alexa, several new speakers, and lots of new devices for the home. Sprinkled in between hardware announcements were a bunch of new ways Alexa is getting smarter. In all, like last year, nearly a dozen new features were introduced today. Here are some of the standouts. One unique offering introduced today is the Education Skills API, a way for skills developers and school districts to connect with popular edtech services like Canvas, Kickboard, and Coursera.

Researchers have presented a new artificial intelligence bot that can predict whether a movie will be a critical and financial siccess by simply analyzing its plot. The team behind the AI presented their paper at the 2019 Storytelling Workshop held in Florence, Italy this month. They claimed that the AI can help movie producers decide which movies might be worth the investment. "As the size of investment for movie production grows bigger, the need for predicting a movie's success in early stages has increased," explained the study authors in the paper's abstract. "To enable a more earlier prediction of a movie's performance, we propose a deep-learning based approach to predict the success of a movie using only its plot summary text."