The invasion of robots into factories and offices has long been seen as final blow for workforces ravaged by cheap offshore labour and the never ending quest to cut costs. However, that is a view being seriously challenged in hi-tech steel fabricating factory just south of Brisbane. Having put "artificially intelligent" welding and cutting equipment to work, Smart Steel Systems chief executive Chis Brugeaud said he was now able to bring back jobs "onshore" and reverse the trend of laying off people as technology improves. "What makes us different from the traditional fabricator is we have as many developers as we do welders, so we can process around 42,000 tonnes of steel a year," Mr Brugeaud told The Business program. Robotics has delivered two noticeable outcomes.

With ever-growing amount of data produced by the Internet of Things, there is a need for a "smart" engine to analyze it and drive valuable insights. Outlining the challenges, this blog post highlights the six stages of an IoT workflow where artificial intelligence can help out. A scary rate of IoT data growth The Internet of Things (IoT) is covering the gamut of industries: healthcare, aviation…www.altoros.com

Chemists looking to cook up new molecules face a challenge of choosing among hundreds of potential molecular building blocks and thousands of chemical reactions for linking them together. Computational chemists have long programmed computers with known chemical reactions, hoping to create software able to calculate successful molecular recipes. Rather they produce a mix of products at different concentrations. So now researchers are looking to artificial intelligence for help. Instead of programming reactions as hard and fast rules, researchers have developed a neural network that learns from millions successful experiments and figures out on its own which reactions to choose to put together new molecules.

What do you get when you give a design tool a digital nervous system? Computers that improve our ability to think and imagine, and robotic systems that come up with (and build) radical new designs for bridges, cars, drones and much more -- all by themselves. Take a tour of the Augmented Age with futurist Maurice Conti and preview a time when robots and humans will work side-by-side to accomplish things neither could do alone. Maurice Conti explores new partnerships between technology, nature and humanity. Maurice Conti explores new partnerships between technology, nature and humanity.

You'd think computers spend most of their time and energy doing, well, computation. But that's not the case: about 90 percent of a computer's execution time and electrical energy is spent transferring data between the processor and the memory banks, says Subhasish Mitra, a computer scientist at Stanford University. Even if Moore's law continued on indefinitely, computers would still be limited by this memory bottleneck. This week in the journal Nature, Mitra and collaborators describe a new computer architecture they say addresses this problem--and that Mitra believes will improve both the energy efficiency and speed of computers by a factor of 1000. The new 3D architecture is based on novel devices including 2 million carbon nanotube transistors and over 1 million resistive RAM cells, all built on top of a layer of silicon using existing fabrication methods and connected by densely packed metal wiring between the layers.

Binary, or one-bit, representations of data arise naturally in many applications, and are appealing in both hardware implementations and algorithm design. In this work, we study the problem of data classification from binary data and propose a framework with low computation and resource costs. We illustrate the utility of the proposed approach through stylized and realistic numerical experiments, and provide a theoretical analysis for a simple case. We hope that our framework and analysis will serve as a foundation for studying similar types of approaches.

Roger Strukhoff is Director of Research at Altoros. He also serves as Executive Director of the Tau Institute for Global ICT Research, Conference Chair of Cloud Expo and Things Expo, Co-Chair of the Big Data World Forum, and Open-Source Chair for the global DCD Converged conference series. He received his BA from Knox College, and conducted MBA studies at California State University/East Bay. Previously in his career, he was VP of New Products at International Data Group and Director of Global Publications at TIBCO Software.

A sleek mechanical arm plunges into a pool of what looks like milky gray ink in Carbon's lab in Redwood City, California. The black arm slowly moves upwards, pulling a latticed plastic cube out of the bath, shiny and dripping with ink: a large-scale model of the porous structure of bone. Joseph DeSimone, Carbon's CEO and cofounder, looks on. DeSimone, a polymer chemist, helped invent these machines, and he still gets a kick out of watching them work. It is a form of 3-D printing, but it's done in a novel way that is faster than previous techniques and works with many more types of plastics.

Oft cited as the blow that is knocking the wind out of the services business, AI has flexed its disruptive muscle. While Uber's advanced algorithms have produced efficiencies in ride sharing and differential pricing that have proved difficult for traditional taxi fleets to compete against, AirBnB is using advanced AI to find the perfect match between host and guest, creating an experience that will shine in comparison to high cost hotel rooms. But AI is more than a disruptive force that will displace businesses or replace workers – the technology is moving mainstream to provide decision support in an increasingly broad range of traditional sectors. A good example of this mainstreet extension of AI can be found in the experience of Vancouver-based Goldcorp Inc., which is using IBM's Watson to optimize exploration. Goldcorp is one of the largest gold mining operations in the world; however, mining in general is characterized as a'high risk, high reward' activity in which ore discovery can have a significant impact on profitability.

At the Empa and Eawag NEST building in Dübendorf, eight ETH Zurich professors as part of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Digital Fabrication are collaborating with business partners to build the three-storey DFAB HOUSE. It is the first building in the world to be designed, planned and built using predominantly digital processes. Robots that build walls and 3D printers that print entire formworks for ceiling slabs – digital fabrication in architecture has developed rapidly in recent years. As part of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Digital Fabrication, architects, robotics specialists, material scientists, structural engineers and sustainability experts from ETH Zurich have teamed up with business partners to put several new digital building technologies from the laboratory into practice. Construction is taking place at NEST, the modular research and innovation building that Empa and Eawag built on their campus in Dübendorf to test new building and energy technologies under real conditions.