Energy

Artificial intelligence offers limitless potential for the financial industry, but at Fortune's MPW International Summit on Tuesday Mastercard vice chairman Ann Cairns also called attention to some of its existential risks. Cairns had recently been in China, where she said it was clear to her that AI was taking off there in a big way--just as it has in Silicon Valley. The question, she says, is whether we will "perpetuate an East-West divide by having different philosophical views as we teach the computers how to think." This human element of AI is also why it's important to get more women into STEM, she said. Cairns, who became vice chairman of Mastercard (ma) earlier this month, noted that if we don't have a diverse group of people working on AI, "we're going to get computers that think like some bro culture on the West Coast."

The IT industry is experiencing an important transformation as companies invest in new technologies to drive growth and innovation. This trend is strongly reflected in our industry as E&P companies deal with enormous amounts of legacy, and increasing volumes of new data along with the expense and complexity of software to analyze and interpret this information. Challenges faced include operational efficiency, increasingly short project cycle times, communicating with a regional or global workforce, data silos, legacy software and restricted resources. Due to the industry's dynamics and its need for flexibility and information security, the cloud is increasingly seen as a viable and practical solution for the oil & gas industry, particularly now that Cloud service providers are building security into their software development processes. Security of data in the Cloud is often better today than in company's own networks.

A spacecraft, spinning in Earth's orbit, reaches inside itself. One of its four arms pulls out a length of polymer pipe that has been 3D-printed inside the body of the machines. All four of the spacecraft's arms are securing pieces together as it builds a new space station right there in orbit. This surreal project, called Archinaut, is the future vision of space manufacturing company Made In Space. The company promises a future of large imaging arrays, kilometer-scale communications tools, and big space stations all built off-planet by smart robots.

The identical robotic explorers, Spirit and Opportunity, were able to trek up to 109 yards each Martian day. They found evidence for liquid water among many other things, with Opportunity traveling farther than any autonomous vehicle on any world: over 45 km (28 miles) over more than 5000 days. In 2004, NASA launched two exploration vehicles to the red planet: the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. These two Mars Exploration Rovers were originally designed for 90-day missions to image, explore, and investigate the Martian surface. Yet these twin solar-powered rovers far exceeded their design lifetimes.

In this episode of Robots in Depth, Per Sjöborg speaks with Andrew Graham about snake arm robots that can get into impossible locations and do things no other system can. Andrew tells the story about starting OC Robotics as a way to ground his robotics development efforts in a customer need. He felt that making something useful gave a great direction to his projects. We also hear about some of the unique properties of snake arm robots: – They can fit in any space that the tip of the robot can get through – They can operate in very tight locations as they are flexible all along and therefore do not sweep large areas to move – They are easy to seal up so that they don't interact with the environment they operate in – They are set up in two parts where the part exposed to the environment and to risk is the cheaper part Andrew then shares some interesting insights from the many projects he has worked on, from fish processing and suit making to bomb disposal and servicing of nuclear power plants. This interview was recorded in 2015.

Eni's Sannazzaro oil refinery, 60km south-west of Milan, is an industrial island surrounded by agriculture. But as well as the jumble of pipes, furnaces and storage tanks that characterise such sites, there is a less familiar scene. Rising from a football pitch-sized parcel of land on the edge of the refinery are six futuristic buildings -- grey, rectangular and windowless -- without any obvious association to the production of petroleum and diesel taking place nearby. These buildings are home to one of the world's most powerful computers with capacity of 18.6 petaflops, a measure of computing speed. That is three times quicker than Facebook's fastest and twice that of Nasa's, according to the Top 500 global ranking of supercomputers.

Wandering the halls of CES Asia it's easy to spot the automotive companies, but sometimes you have to look at the logos instead of looking for actual vehicles on display. The booths here at the show in Shanghai, China are full of global and domestic brands showing off everything from self-driving vehicles to futuristic concepts to useful doo-dads for today's cars. The focus of the automakers here at @CESAsia is obviously not on the cars themselves, but on mobility. You hear this a lot, but to see the @Honda booth with no actual cars in it really drives that home. Just because Honda didn't have any actual vehicles on display is not to say that every company wanted to promote mobility ideas over cars.

China's grand designs to dominate the future of clean energy paid off spectacularly this week. In a public offering on June 11 in Shenzhen, battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. (CATL) raised nearly $1 billion to fund ambitious expansion plans, and its stock has been shooting up every day since. Thanks largely to the company's new plants, China will be making 70 percent of the world's electric-vehicle batteries by 2021, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). The rapid rise of CATL is arguably the clearest, though certainly not the only, payoff from China's calculated efforts to bolster its domestic battery and electric-vehicle industries--two of the most promising sectors in clean energy. These efforts have largely followed the same playbook China used to get ahead in solar panels, including highly automated manufacturing; aggressive efforts to lock in global supply chains; foreign acquisitions and licensing; and hefty doses of government support and protectionism.

The environment is a hot topic, literally. As global temperatures have warmed since 1850, the discussion on what to do about it has heated up as well. Humanity is having an undeniable impact on the natural world. Our growing demand for resources is leading to land-use changes, loss of biodiversity and pollution. Climate change continues to disrupt weather patterns, temperatures and water availability, leading to impacts on human and natural ecosystems -- even the forests are on the move.

Artificial intelligence offers limitless potential for the financial industry, but at Fortune's MPW International Summit on Tuesday Mastercard vice chairman Ann Cairns also called attention to some of its existential risks. Cairns had recently been in China, where she said it was clear to her that AI was taking off there in a big way--just as it has in Silicon Valley. The question, she says, is whether we will "perpetuate an East-West divide by having different philosophical views as we teach the computers how to think." This human element of AI is also why it's important to get more women into STEM, she said. Cairns, who became vice chairman of Mastercard (ma) earlier this month, noted that if we don't have a diverse group of people working on AI, "we're going to get computers that think like some bro culture on the West Coast."