ORANGE COUNTY, CA / ACCESSWIRE / February 4, 2018 / When many people think of Artificial Intelligence, their mind is immediately drawn to the idea of computers replacing humans. Nick Kohlschreiber, explains, AI technology when fused into everyday use in the business world can transform the way in which companies conduct outreach online, and benefits both parties with more personalized information and a more efficient way for consumers to ultimately get what they want. The first thing Nick Kohlschreiber points out is that artificial intelligence is here to stay. More importantly, it is changing the way companies do business. A recent article in Business Insider suggests that artificial intelligence transforms marketing by changing how consumers are discovered, connected to, and communicated with.

Which technologies have the greatest potential to transform the world over the next decade? The National Football League is teaming up with Sleep Number to help its players use big data and machine learning to improve their sleep and boost performance. Research and advisory firm Lux Research set out to find the answer, applying its in-house data analysis platform and the expertise of its global technical team to identify and rank the 18 most transformative technologies. The firm's newly released "18 for 2018" report covers everything "from current rock stars of innovation to hidden gem technologies." At the top of the list of potentially transformative technologies is machine learning and deep neural networks.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and international collaborators have demonstrated computers' readiness to solve the universe's mysteries. The team used thousands of images from simulated high-energy particle collisions to train neural networks to identify important features. They found the networks were up to 95-percent successful in recognizing important features in a sampling of about 18,000 images. The researchers say machine-learning algorithms enable the networks to improve their analysis as they process more images, with the underlying technology employed in facial recognition and other types of image-based object recognition applications. "With this type of machine learning, we are trying to identify a certain pattern or correlation of patterns that is a unique signature of the equation of state," says Long-Gang Pan of the University of California, Berkeley.

The colored lines represent calculated particle tracks from particle collisions occurring within Brookhaven National Laboratory's STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, and an illustration of a digital brain. The yellow-red glow at center shows a hydrodynamic simulation of quark-gluon plasma created in particle collisions. Computers can beat chess champions, simulate star explosions, and forecast global climate. We are even teaching them to be infallible problem-solvers and fast learners. And now, physicists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and their collaborators have demonstrated that computers are ready to tackle the universe's greatest mysteries.

Baker Hughes GE and Nvidia are collaborating to bring artificial intelligence and analytics to the oil and gas industry in a move that aims to absorb data from sensors, weather, drilling, and seismic data as well as make operations more predictive. Binu Mathew, global head of digital products for Baker Hughes GE, said the Nvidia collaboration will leverage GPU-powered systems on rigs and in the cloud to make sense of data related to oil drilling. "In an oil and gas field there are a lot of sensors and data in remote operations that's collected, but very little of it is analyzed," said Mathew. The oil and gas industry has plenty of data, but not necessarily information and knowledge. With Nvidia, Baker Hughes GE is building computational models for the Internet of Things and aiming to provide analytics and actionable information, said Mathew.

The billowing compute and data demands that spurred the oil and gas industry to be the largest commercial users of high-performance computing are now propelling the competitive sector to deploy the latest AI technologies. Beyond the requirement for accurate and speedy seismic and reservoir simulation, oil and gas operations face torrents of sensor, geolocation, weather, drilling and seismic data. Just the sensor data alone from one off-shore rig can accrue to hundreds of terabytes of data annually, however most of this remains unanalyzed, dark data.

Power plants can deploy these innovative technologies today to more accurately predict the condition of assets and schedule appropriate maintenance to correct equipment problems before failure. Although the new administration in Washington has reversed the "war on coal," long-term trends in the U.S. are not promising. Most coal-fired capacity was built between 1950 and 1990, and the average coal plant is about 42 years old. With plant retirements expected to continue in 2018 and beyond, investment in new plants has come to a standstill. The confluence of regulatory issues and alternative energy sources is well known.

In today's digital and "always-on" world, customers expect retailers to anticipated and meet their needs in real time. However, this type of customer engagement is more than what retailers are used to providing.

Winston is founder of Winston Eco-Strategies and an adviser to multinationals on how they can navigate humanity's biggest challenges and profit from solving them. He is the coauthor of the international bestseller Green to Gold and, more recently, the author of the popular book The Big Pivot: Radically Practical Strategies for a Hotter, Scarcer, and More Open World. What is the purpose of artificial intelligence? The hype about AI, with its massive potential to disrupt business and society, is likely true. AI could make business radically more efficient and answer questions we didn't even know we had.

If the history of human advancement has taught us one thing it is this: genuine step-change progress does not occur because of a single technology breakthrough, but a combination of multiple complementary factors coming together at the same time. The Industrial Revolution, which began around 1760, was driven by an amalgamation of steam power, improvements in iron production and the development of the first machine tools. Similarly, the PC revolution of the early 1970's was the outcome of simultaneous advancements in micro-processing, memory storage, software programming and other factors. Now, as we enter 2018, we are at the cusp of a new revolution, one that will ultimately transform every organisation, every industry and every public service across the world. The concept of AI is not new.