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.

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.