Closed-loop manufacturing is central to Manufacturing 4.0 automation, but it's also been in place on production floors for years. But can it be automated to work with little or no human intervention? A closed-loop system on a production floor is a set of machines utilized in manufacturing that communicate and coordinate with each other to get certain processes done. The only catch is when something goes wrong and an alert is issued. At that point, a human has to step in to resolve the issue.

Knowledge Graph (KG) inference is the vital technique to address the natural incompleteness of KGs. The existing KG inference approaches can be classified into rule learning-based and KG embedding-based models. However, these approaches cannot well balance accuracy, generalization, interpretability and efficiency, simultaneously. Besides, these models always rely on pure triples and neglect additional information. Therefore, both KG embedding (KGE) and rule learning KG inference approaches face challenges due to the sparse entities and the limited semantics. We propose a novel and effective closed-loop KG inference framework EngineKGI operating similarly as an engine based on these observations. EngineKGI combines KGE and rule learning to complement each other in a closed-loop pattern while taking advantage of semantics in paths and concepts. KGE module exploits paths to enhance the semantic association between entities and introduces rules for interpretability. A novel rule pruning mechanism is proposed in the rule learning module by leveraging paths as initial candidate rules and employing KG embeddings together with concepts for extracting more high-quality rules. Experimental results on four real-world datasets show that our model outperforms other baselines on link prediction tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of our model on KG inference in a joint logic and data-driven fashion with a closed-loop mechanism.

The move from automated to autonomous process manufacturing is right around the corner. This article comes from the May 2021 issue of Intech Focus: Process Control and Safety. For process manufacturing, the ultimate promise of Industry 4.0 is autonomous manufacturing. Autonomous control of manufacturing processes is required, not to eliminate human workers, but to build resilient and highly responsive manufacturing supply chains. Resilience is required to enhance the top and bottom lines of a manufacturing enterprise.

Active learning - the field of machine learning (ML) dedicated to optimal experiment design, has played a part in science as far back as the 18th century when Laplace used it to guide his discovery of celestial mechanics [1]. In this work we focus a closed-loop, active learning-driven autonomous system on another major challenge, the discovery of advanced materials against the exceedingly complex synthesis-processes-structure-property landscape. We demonstrate autonomous research methodology (i.e. autonomous hypothesis definition and evaluation) that can place complex, advanced materials in reach, allowing scientists to fail smarter, learn faster, and spend less resources in their studies, while simultaneously improving trust in scientific results and machine learning tools. Additionally, this robot science enables science-over-the-network, reducing the economic impact of scientists being physically separated from their labs. We used the real-time closed-loop, autonomous system for materials exploration and optimization (CAMEO) at the synchrotron beamline to accelerate the fundamentally interconnected tasks of rapid phase mapping and property optimization, with each cycle taking seconds to minutes, resulting in the discovery of a novel epitaxial nanocomposite phase-change memory material.

From the simplest unicellular organisms to complex animals, feedback control based on sensing and actuation is a staple of self‐regulation in biological processes and is a key to life itself. Malfunctioning of this control loop can often lead to disease or death. Bioelectronic devices that interface electronics with biological systems can be used for sensing and actuation of biological processes and have potential for novel therapeutic applications. Due to the complexity of biological systems and the challenge of affecting their innate self‐regulation, closing the loop between sensing and actuation with bioelectronics is difficult to achieve. Herein, bioelectronic proton‐conducting devices are integrated with fluorescence sensing using machine learning to provide closed‐loop control of bioelectronic actuation in living cells.

Newly, the rates of energy and material consumption to augment industrial pro-duction are substantially high, thus the environmentally sustainable industrial de-velopment has emerged as the main issue of either developed or developing coun-tries. A novel approach to supply chain management is proposed to maintain economic growth along with environmentally friendly concerns for the design of the supply chain network. In this paper, a new green supply chain design approach has been suggested to maintain the financial virtue accompanying the environ-mental factors that required to be mitigated the negative effect of rapid industrial development on the environment. This approach has been suggested a multi-objective mathematical model minimizing the total costs and CO2 emissions for establishing an environmentally sustainable closed-loop supply chain. Two opti-mization methods are used namely Epsilon Constraint Method, and Genetic Al-gorithm Optimization Method. The results of the two mentioned methods have been compared and illustrated their effectiveness. The outcome of the analysis is approved to verify the accuracy of the proposed model to deal with financial and environmental issues concurrently.

People with type 1 diabetes (T1D) lack the ability to produce the insulin their bodies need. As a result, they must continually make decisions about how much insulin to self-administer to adequately control their blood glucose levels. Longitudinal data streams captured from wearables, like continuous glucose monitors, can help these individuals manage their health, but currently the majority of the decision burden remains on the user. To relieve this burden, researchers are working on closed-loop solutions that combine a continuous glucose monitor and an insulin pump with a control algorithm in an `artificial pancreas.' Such systems aim to estimate and deliver the appropriate amount of insulin. Here, we develop reinforcement learning (RL) techniques for automated blood glucose control. Through a series of experiments, we compare the performance of different deep RL approaches to non-RL approaches. We highlight the flexibility of RL approaches, demonstrating how they can adapt to new individuals with little additional data. On over 2.1 million hours of data from 30 simulated patients, our RL approach outperforms baseline control algorithms: leading to a decrease in median glycemic risk of nearly 50% from 8.34 to 4.24 and a decrease in total time hypoglycemic of 99.8%, from 4,610 days to 6. Moreover, these approaches are able to adapt to predictable meal times (decreasing average risk by an additional 24% as meals increase in predictability). This work demonstrates the potential of deep RL to help people with T1D manage their blood glucose levels without requiring expert knowledge. All of our code is publicly available, allowing for replication and extension.

The goal of neural-symbolic computation is to integrate the connectionist and symbolist paradigms. Prior methods learn the neural-symbolic models using reinforcement learning (RL) approaches, which ignore the error propagation in the symbolic reasoning module and thus converge slowly with sparse rewards. In this paper, we address these issues and close the loop of neural-symbolic learning by (1) introducing the \textbf{grammar} model as a \textit{symbolic prior} to bridge neural perception and symbolic reasoning, and (2) proposing a novel \textbf{back-search} algorithm which mimics the top-down human-like learning procedure to propagate the error through the symbolic reasoning module efficiently. We further interpret the proposed learning framework as maximum likelihood estimation using Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling and the back-search algorithm as a Metropolis-Hastings sampler. The experiments are conducted on two weakly-supervised neural-symbolic tasks: (1) handwritten formula recognition on the newly introduced HWF dataset; (2) visual question answering on the CLEVR dataset. The results show that our approach significantly outperforms the RL methods in terms of performance, converging speed, and data efficiency. Our code and data are released at \url{https://liqing-ustc.github.io/NGS}.

JAGGAER has itself been moving towards closed-loop feedback systems that rely on machine learning for continuous improvement. Here we describe an example: the JAGGAER Digital Assistant. JAGGAER, ERP and third-party data is fed into a central data layer. The information is used in traditional analytics and reporting, but what is new is that algorithms are now providing real-time support for decisions, recommendations and actions. Typically, there might be several recommendations and the end-user takes a decision based on which of these makes most sense.

Many intelligent systems currently interact with others using at least one of fixed communication inputs or preset responses, resulting in rigid interaction experiences and extensive efforts developing a variety of scenarios for the system. Fixed inputs limit the natural behavior of the user in order to effectively communicate, and preset responses prevent the system from adapting to the current situation unless it was specifically implemented. Closed-loop interaction instead focuses on dynamic responses that account for what the user is currently doing based on interpretations of their perceived activity. Agents employing closed-loop interaction can also monitor their interactions to ensure that the user responds as expected. We introduce a closed-loop interactive agent framework that integrates planning and recognition to predict what the user is trying to accomplish and autonomously decide on actions to take in response to these predictions. Based on a recent demonstration of such an assistive interactive agent in a turn-based simulated game, we also discuss new research challenges that are not present in the areas of artificial intelligence planning or recognition alone.