Addressing the South Australian government's recent Copper to the World conference in Adelaide, Newcrest's chief information and digital officer, Gavin Wood, gave a rundown on what had already been achieved at Newcrest with data science, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. He also talked about the benefits delivered by crowd sourcing, although this can also create some unique challenges of its own. "If you can imagine, an experienced operator at a site being told by a university student in Argentina the answer for optimising their part of the plant is quite different to something they believe from their experience of 20 or so years. Those are real challenges for our business," Wood said. He said data science coupled with machine learning had alr...

Investment in artificial intelligence is growing in Canada. In 2017, venture capital investment in AI nearly doubled - to $12 billion. And looking at the agriculture sector, AI is helping farmers to increase crop yields, save costs and reduce environmental damages. For generations, farmers have relied on their own knowledge of the land and past experience to get the most profit from their farms, regardless of if they had a dairy or raised food crops. With the new technologies available today, farmers can now target their use of fertilizers or herbicides, saving money and minimizing environmental damage.

We can also apply these algorithms to entire mining operations to help predict and react to different ore types and optimize operations. This concept is essentially an upgrade to geometallurgy: each block of rock within a deposit is tagged with all the information that can affect its economic viability. This should include grade, recovery, hardness, mining recovery/dilution as well as the costs to mine, process and reclaim those blocks. All of these parameters are essential to effectively optimize an operation and enable short- and medium-term planning, but they are difficult to estimate locally. The quality of machine learning predictions is highly dependent on data quality but more so on the quantity and wide distribution of data.

A research team at Korea's Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) succeeded in analyzing big data up to 1,000 times faster than existing technology by using GPU-based'GMiner' technology. The finding of big data pattern analysis is expected to be utilized in various industries including the finance and IT sectors. An international team of researchers, led by Professor Min-Soo Kim from Department of Information and Communication Engineering developed'GMiner' technology that can analyze big data patterns at high speed. GMiner technology exhibits performance up to 1,000 times faster than the world's current best pattern mining technology. Pattern mining technology identifies all important patterns that appear repeatedly in the big data of various fields such as buying goods at mega-marts, banking transactions, network packets, and social networks.

Michio Kaku: People often ask me the question, "In the era of AI what jobs and what skills will I need?" Well, first of all let's take a look at the first era of space exploration the 1960s. There was a crash program back then to miniaturize the transistor. The Russian astronauts, they're also very tiny because they have to fit inside the nose cone of a missile, and we scientists were given the mission to miniaturize transistors as far as possible. Now, as a consequence of that, we have what is called the Internet age today.

Digital transformation is no longer an "if" but a "when" for enterprises across both public and private sector. The promise of greater efficiency, customer-centric products and services, rapid response to changing regulatory or economic requirements – and the chance to compete with disruptive start-ups percolating every sector of the economy can no longer be overlooked. The challenge is how to get started and get the runs on the board that build innovation momentum. Google Cloud's Nigel Watson believes machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) offer the most straightforward way to demonstrate what digital transformation can deliver. Watson is Head of Cloud Technology Partners, Japan and Asia Pacific for Google Cloud.

Tune in to this extraordinary edition of S.M.A.C. Talk Technology Podcast in which we examine how to become a disruptor (not disrupted!) in every industry Innovation itself isn't the entire challenge – pockets of innovation can be found in most any company, from the wildly successful to those that have failed spectacularly. The real challenge is being able to innovate at scale across an entire organization, all while creating a mechanism for those innovations to be shared, sustained, and to drive value back into the core of the business. In this series of podcasts, we'll explore how you can make that happen in your business. Listen in on these talks from your fellow innovators to discover how to embrace digital transformation and become a disruptor in your industry. More than 3,100 global executives took part in the most comprehensive global study of its kind, conducted by Oxford Economics.

If you were inventing the farm today, why would you put it outside, on a giant plot of land? OK, there's the sunlight thing, but then you get droughts and frosts and plant-munching insects that have to be battled with harmful pesticides. And because outdoor farms need so much acreage, they're usually far from most of their customers -- which means that by the time a tomato gets to you in a city, it tastes like a baseball. But now, upstarts such as Bowery farming, AeroFarms, and Lettuce Networks are doing something different. They're using data and artificial intelligence to operate more efficiently than traditional farms. The new generation of farming promises to feed more people while doing less environmental damage.

IBM has been on the AI journey for a long time, but the path has not always been smooth. My experience in the consulting business has taught me that successful practitioners need to be flexible and quick to make course corrections. We at IBM have learned along our AI journey, and here are three lessons that come to mind from my own interaction with clients and business colleagues. Remember the adage: garbage in, garbage out. We've acknowledged that the results of data analysis are sometimes misleading or even inaccurate.

The government signed a peace accord in late 2016 with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which was heavily involved in coca production and cocaine trafficking. Since the group demobilized, many new gangs have moved in and taken over its lucrative business and trafficking routes.