German company BASF is establishing its presence in the rice sector of Japan by offering an AI tool that helps farmers make up for a labor shortage, according to a report by Nikkei. This year, Yamazaki Rice, a company with five employees and around 100 hectares of land in Saitama prefecture, started utilizing the Xarvio Field Manager system from BASF. Real-time analysis for satellite and weather is offered by Xarvio. The amount of fertilizer advised for each farm area is also customized by automated maps. The data is then transmitted to farm machinery with GPS.

BASF, the largest chemical producer in the world, has been collaborating with LSU chemical engineers to better understand and predict its own production ebbs and flows using artificial intelligence, or AI. The project adds to an ongoing partnership between LSU and BASF to develop emerging STEM talent across disciplines in Louisiana. BASF's chemical manufacturing plant in Geismar in Ascension Parish is one of the company's six largest integrated production sites across 80 countries. It supplies products to a wide variety of industries, including agriculture, construction, energy and health. Chemicals such as solvents, amines, resins, glues, electronic-grade chemicals, industrial gases, basic petrochemicals and inorganic chemicals are produced at Geismar in about 30 interconnected production units, each containing its own subunits.

In late November the U.S. Federal Drug Administration approved Benevolent AI's recommended arthritis drug Baricitnib as a COVID-19 treatment, just nine-months after the hypothesis was developed. The correlation between the properties of this existing Eli Lilly drug and a potential treatment for seriously ill COVID-19 patients, was made with the help of knowledge graphs, which represent data in context, in a manner that humans and machines can readily understand. Knowledge graphs apply semantics to give context and relationships to data, providing a framework for data integration, unification, analytics and sharing. Think of them as a flexible means of discovering facts and relationships between people, processes, applications and data, in ways that give companies new insights into their businesses, create new services and improve R&D research. Benevolent AI, a six-year-old London-based company which has developed a platform of computational and experimental technologies and processes that can draw on vast quantities of biomedical data to advance drug development, built-in the use of knowledge graphs from day one.

The chemical industry is -without question- one of the most important industries in the world. Not only do 90% of our everyday products contain chemicals, but the industry also employs approximately 10 million people. Naturally, they were one of the first to embrace digital technologies such as process control systems or sensors which have a long tradition in production. According to Frithjof Netzer, Senior Vice-President and Project Lead 4.0 of BASF: "A lot of energy and momentum in the field of digital can be observed, Chemicals are catching up. It is not the question if, but rather what and how it will be done." A continuous digital transformation plays a crucial role in several key aspects of the industry.

The dietary supplements category has its share of fad ingredients or formulations, and for years the industry was able to maintain high levels of new product launches thanks to a steady flow of new ingredients coming onto the market. But increased media and consumer scrutiny and the long shadow of the NDI process does seem to have had a chilling effect on the introduction of new ingredients launches over the past decade. Back in November 2015, Colin Watts, then-CEO of The Vitamin Shoppe, said: "I think the issue that we are facing this year is […] the rate of new ingredients, new products, new forms that are coming into the market are less than we've seen in the past. "And so when there isn't a lot of new in this category in particular, especially the retailer ends up taking a little bit earlier of a hit in that front, because the customer just doesn't have a reason to come in and see something new that's going on" Innovation is still occurring, of course: You can point to innovation in delivery formats, in the supply chain and around the science, but one of greatest benefits to the industry has come from technology. The Internet was barely a thing when the Dietary Supplement Health & Education Act (DSHEA) was signed into law in 1994, and now every single brand has an online presence.

The first step of the partnership will see Nuritas, a biotech and R&D start-up that uses artificial intelligence and new technologies for the discovery of novel food and health ingredients, grant an exclusive royalty-based license to BASF to commercialise one of its existing peptides. A second part of the deal will focus on the discovery of new functional peptides, based on health areas that are strategically important to BASF, using Nuritas' technological expertise and AI platform. According to BASF, peptide networks of focus in the collaboration will be natural, food-derived, patented and of significant benefit to health – including peptides that bring about anti-inflammatory responses. "Cooperating with an innovative and agile start-up like Nuritas enables us to further expand our already broad portfolio of health solutions," commented Saori Dubourg, head of BASF's Nutrition & Health Business. Nuritas' unique platform combines DNA analysis and artificial intelligence (AI) to predict, unlock, and validate peptides from natural sources.