WIRE)--Citrine Informatics has been named an Enterprise of the Year Gold winner in the Best in Biz Awards, the only independent business awards program judged by prominent editors and reporters from top-tier publications in North America. Citrine Informatics' artificial intelligence technology is used by the world's largest materials and chemicals companies to accelerate the product development cycle. Since 2011, Best in Biz Awards' entrants have spanned the spectrum, from the most innovative local companies and start-ups to some of the most recognizable global brands. With more than 700 entries, the 9th annual program attracted a record number of entries from an impressive array of public and private companies of all sizes and spanning all geographic regions and industries in the U.S. and Canada. Best in Biz Awards 2019 honors were conferred in 80 different categories, including Company of the Year, Fastest-Growing Company, Most Innovative Company, Best Place to Work, Customer Service Department, Executive of the Year, Most Innovative Product, Enterprise Product, Best New Service, CSR Program, Event and Blog of the Year.

CHICAGO – Agribusiness is increasingly turning to natural and sustainable alternatives to chemicals as consumers rebuff genetically modified foods and concerns grow over Big Ag's role in climate change. At the heart of the trend are innovations that harness beneficial microorganizms in the soil, including seed-coatings of naturally occurring bacteria and fungi that can do the same work as traditional chemicals, from warding off pests to helping plants flourish, according to a global patent study by research firm GreyB Services. Much of the research in crop biotech is centered in the United States, China, Germany, Japan and South Korea, according to the U.N. agency WIPO. "Both entrepreneurs and investors are saying, 'Hey, the writing is on the wall, we're entering a post-chemical world,'" said Rob LeClerc, chief executive officer of AgFunder, an online venture-capital platform. "The seed companies who have billions in market cap are like'We need to do something,' and everyone recognizes the opportunity."

In recent years, interest in monitoring air quality has been growing. Traditional environmental monitoring stations are very expensive, both to acquire and to maintain, therefore their deployment is generally very sparse. This is a problem when trying to generate air quality maps with a fine spatial resolution. Given the general interest in air quality monitoring, low-cost air quality sensors have become an active area of research and development. Low-cost air quality sensors can be deployed at a finer level of granularity than traditional monitoring stations. Furthermore, they can be portable and mobile. Low-cost air quality sensors, however, present some challenges: they suffer from cross-sensitivities between different ambient pollutants; they can be affected by external factors such as traffic, weather changes, and human behavior; and their accuracy degrades over time. Some promising machine learning approaches can help us obtain highly accurate measurements with low-cost air quality sensors. In this article, we present low-cost sensor technologies, and we survey and assess machine learning-based calibration techniques for their calibration. We conclude by presenting open questions and directions for future research.

Imagine a world where plastic materials would never go to waste. Agilyx Corporation ("Agilyx"), the leader in chemical recycling of post-use plastics back into plastics chemicals and low carbon fuels, today announced a dynamic collaboration in artificial intelligence (AI) technology with the General Electric Company through its Licensing business unit that would bring the world closer than ever to making this green dream possible. Combining Agilyx's deep domain experience in chemical recycling with GE's vast experience in the application of Industrial AI, the two companies are aiming to increase the chemical recyclability of all post-use plastics from the current 10% to over 95%. This announcement is the result of a year-long, successful effort to assess GE's advanced modeling technology developed by GE Research, and its applicability to the database of chemical conversions of post-use plastics that Agilyx has amassed over the last 15 years. Together, the companies can greatly improve recycling rates by deploying an innovative set of artificial intelligence ("AI") technologies, including machine learning ("ML"), predictive modeling ("PM") and optimization tools, in combination with other supply chain innovations in partnership with a growing number of diverse leaders in the waste and recycling, petrochemical, consumer goods products and retail industries.

Many a middle school science teacher has dripped a few drops of potassium iodide into hydrogen peroxide and watched the delight of their students as a volcano of foam erupted from the container. This experiment is often the way young people first learn about catalysts as something that that can induce a chemical reaction. But catalysts can make more than foam. As those young people grow into young scientists, they learn that catalysis--the acceleration of a chemical reaction by a catalyst--is a key process in the creation of just about everything. From the plastics that make up our medical equipment, to the gasoline in our cars, to the paint that colors our homes--none of these could exist without catalysts.

The Anglo-Saxon vessel found in the Sutton Hoo burial mound in Suffolk 80 years ago will sail again as experts look to rebuild the ship from digital 3D models. Dated back to the early 7th century, the 90 foot (27 metre) -long vessel is oft dubbed a'ghost ship' thanks to its manner of preservation. In the mound -- thought the resting place of King Rædwald -- only the impression of the ship and its iron rivets remained, the timber having long rotted away. Nevertheless, a team of archaeologists and shipbuilders have succeeded in creating a three-dimensional digital mock-up of the vessel to allow it to be reconstructed. Expert hope that recreating a full-size, fully-operational version of the ship will help shine light on how the Anglo-Saxons began England's tradition of seafaring.

Farmers may soon have an alternative to spraying their fields with chemicals, as Small Robot Company and RootWave, two UK-based agritech startups, today announced a partnership to develop a high-precision robot that can kill weeds with a zap of electricity. Small Robot has already developed a series of small, agricultural robots, called Tom, Dick and Harry, which can automate some of the routine tasks of farming. Tom, a scouting robot similar to the Mars Rover, for example, uses computer vision to map the weeds in a field, covering about 20 hectares a day. Dick, a weeding robot, can already remove unwanted plants with either a micro-dose of pesticide or by physically crushing them, but the next stage will be to combine this with technology from RootWave, which destroys weeds by with an electric current, essentially boiling them from the inside out. "Farmers are really desperate for an alternative to the chemical control of weeds," says Sam Watson Jones, the chief executive of Small Robot Company.

I'm trying to explain to Arthur I. Miller why artworks generated by computers don't quite do it for me. The works aren't a portal into another person's mind, where you can wander in a warren of intention, emotion, and perception, feeling life being shaped into form. What's more, it often seems, people just ain't no good, so it's transcendent to be reminded they can be. Art is one of the few human creations that can do that. No matter how engaging the songs or poems that a computer generates may be, they ultimately feel empty. They lack the electricity of the human body, the hum of human consciousness, the connection with another person.

On a warm day in April 2013, I was sitting in a friend's kitchen in Paris, trying to engineer serendipity. I was trying to get my computer to write music on its own. I wanted to be able to turn it on and have it spit out not just any goofy little algorithmic tune but beautiful, compelling, mysterious music; something I'd be proud to have written myself. The kitchen window was open, and as I listened to the sounds of children playing in the courtyard below, I thought about how the melodies of their voices made serendipitous counterpoint with the songs of nearby birds and the intermittent drone of traffic on the rue d'Alésia. In response to these daydreams, I was making a few tweaks to my software--a chaotic, seat-of-the-pants affair that betrayed my intuitive, self-taught approach to programming--when I saw that Bill Seaman had just uploaded a new batch of audio files to our shared Dropbox folder. I had been collaborating with Bill, a media artist, on various aspects of computational creativity over the past few years. I loaded Bill's folder of sound files along with some of my own into the software and set it rolling. I was thrilled and astonished.

Ross Goodwin has had an extraordinary career. After playing about with computers as a child, he studied economics, then became a speech writer for President Obama, writing presidential proclamations, then took a variety of freelance writing jobs. One of these involved churning out business letters--he calls it freelance ghostwriting. The letters were all pretty much the same, so he figured out an algorithm that would generate form letters, using a few samples as a database. The algorithm jumbled up paragraphs and lines following certain templates, then reassembled them to produce business letters, similar but each varying in style, saving him the job of starting anew each time. He thought he was on to something new but soon found out that this was a well-explored area.