Berkeley-based Lygos is engineering and designing microbes that convert low-cost sugar into high-value, specialty chemicals. In other words, the latest advances in software, big data, machine learning, biotech, and chemistry may be combining to quite possibly start a new industrial revolution. Lygos develops microbes to convert sugar into high-value specialty chemicals, focusing its flagship product on malonic acid (derived from petroleum), which is used in a diverse set of industries, including flavor and fragrance, electronic manufacturing, and coatings. And, though they will borrow tech from the titans of Silicon Valley (e.g., TensorFlow from Google), and cloud vendors like AWS will lower the bar for developers dipping their toes into machine learning, the biggest impact of big data will not go toward ad-clicking strategies.

DuPont has a rich history of scientific discovery that has enabled countless innovations and today, we're looking for more people, in more places, to collaborate with us to make life the best that it can be. Seeking a Data Engineer/Software Developer to design, develop, and implement high quality data solutions and applications for our data science and analytics platform in AWS. Education & Experience: BS degree in Computer Science, Physics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.

To accelerate growth across the continent, Rockwell acquired Hiprom in 2011. Hiprom, a Johannesburg-based corporation, is a process control and automation systems integrator specialising in mining and mineral processing. When Rockwell acquired Hiprom, a company spokesperson revealed that the acquisition was a strategic play to strengthen their global project management and delivery capabilities in the mining, metals and minerals industries. According to John Lewis, Rockwell's current director of business partnering, Hiprom - which is still run out of South Africa - is now the group's global mining competency centre of excellence. In a recent podcast conversation I had with Lewis, he shared how Rockwell is adapting to changing times by hiring software developers and tech-savvy business specialists who can speak to the myriad optimisation challenges faced by their clients all over the world.

The elevator doors snap shut behind Otto Solis and his fellow ironworkers. With a quick shudder, gears kick in for a rattling 90-second ascent through the concrete structure rising at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Figueroa Street in downtown Los Angeles. The men huddle in the confined space. Wearing hard hats, bandannas, kneepads and gloves, they look like gladiators ready to fight. Foreman Solis and his crew of 10 belong to a class of ironworkers known as rod busters.

Over the past few years we've developed artificially intelligent machines that can do many things that used to require human minds: understanding speech, diagnosing disease, checking the terms of a contract, designing a mechanical part from scratch, even coming up with new scientific hypotheses that are supported by subsequent research. As this new software is embedded in hardware we'll get self-driving cars, trucks, and combines; delivery and inspection drones; and robots of many kinds. These technologies are improving more quickly than even their creators would have predicted at the start of the decade, and the fact that the world's best players of both the Asian strategy game go and no limit heads up Texas hold-em poker are now AI systems indicates just how deeply they're encroaching into human territory. So shouldn't we be preparing ourselves for massive AI-induced technological unemployment? A widely cited 2015 analysis by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford University found that 47% of current jobs in the US were susceptible to computerization.

Ask an upstream operator which area in the oil and gas patch they expect to have reliability problems and the answer will commonly come back "compressors." Compressors, used to increase the pressure of natural gas or air to improve flow, are the first on the list, said Ron Beck, industry marketing director for energy at Aspen Technology, an asset optimization software firm. But with no end to potential oilfield malfunctions, some oil and gas companies have turned to machine learning--a process in which software is used to search data, detect patterns and assess the likelihood of future failures. The software uses algorithms--a series of calculations and automated reasoning tasks--to help overcome potentially troublesome equipment. The digital shift is part of the oil and gas industry's acceptance of more efficient and cost-effective technologies to assist in extracting and producing oil and gas in a range-bound commodity-price environment.

Online volunteers are helping to track slavery from space. A new crowdsourcing project aims to identify South Asian brick kilns – frequently the site of forced labour – in satellite images. This data will then be used to train machine learning algorithms to automatically recognise brick kilns in satellite imagery. If computers can pinpoint the location of possible slavery sites, then the coordinates could be passed to local non-governmental organisations to investigate, says Kevin Bales, who is leading the project at the University of Nottingham in the UK. South Asian brick kilns are notorious sites of modern-day slavery.

When applied to previously-collected atmospheric samples and data, their findings support evidence that on average these bioaerosols globally make up less than 1 percent of the particles in the upper troposphere -- where they could influence cloud formation and by extension, the climate -- and not around 25 to 50 percent as some previous research suggests. While atmospheric and climate modeling suggests that bioaerosols, globally averaged, are not abundant and efficient enough at freezing to significantly influence cloud formation, research findings have varied significantly. The group leveraged the presence of phosphorus in the mass spectra to train the classification machine learning algorithm on known samples and then, primed, applied it to field data acquired from Desert Research Institute's Storm Peak Laboratory in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and from the Carbonaceous Aerosol and Radiative Effects Study based in the town of Cool, California. Knowing that the principal atmospheric emissions of phosphorus are from mineral dust, combustion products, and biological particles, they exploited the presence of phosphate and organic nitrogen ions and their characteristic ratios in known samples to classify the particles.

The suckers of an octopus have inspired the creation of a new adhesive patch that can stick to wet and dry surfaces. After studying the anatomy of an octopus' tentacle, the scientists made a patch created from flexible sheets of rubber covered in artificial suction cups. The sticky patches could one day be used to create wound dressings that can easily be taken on and off and may even inspire a generation of Spiderman-style robots that can scale walls, according to researchers. After studying the anatomy of an octopus' tentacle, the scientists made a patch created from flexible sheets of rubber covered in tiny holes. To create the adhesive, the scientists concentrated on recreating a dome-shaped bulge found at the bottom of the octopus' suction patch.

Machines won't become intelligent unless they incorporate certain features of the human brain. Europe's massive €1 billion project has shifted focus from simulation to informatics By Megan Scudellari Large-scale brainlike systems are possible with existing technology--if we're willing to spend the money By Jennifer Hasler Researchers in this specialized field have hitched their wagon to deep learning's star By Lee Gomes Running algorithms that mimic a rat's navigation neurons, heavy machines will soon plumb Australia's underground mines By Jean Kumagai Artificial intelligence might endow some computers with self-awareness.