Amazon today launched SageMaker Reinforcement Learning (RL) Kubeflow Components, a toolkit supporting the company's AWS RoboMaker service for orchestrating robotics workflows. Amazon says that the goal is to make it faster to experiment and manage robotics workloads from perception to controls and optimization, and to create end-to-end solutions without having to rebuild them each time. Robots are being used more widely for purposes that are increasing in sophistication, like assembly, picking and packing, last-mile delivery, environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and assisted surgery. In China, Oxford Economics anticipates 12.5 million manufacturing jobs will become automated, while in the U.S., McKinsey projects that machines will take upwards of 30% of such jobs. As for reinforcement learning, it's an emerging AI technique that can help develop solutions for the kinds of problems that are increasingly cropping up in robotics.

Woodside Petroleum's chief technology officer believes robots with comparable human dexterity skills are still five to 10 years away. Shaun Gregory told the Resources Technology Showcase that the limited dexterity offered by current robotics technologies suggested there was little immediate danger of humans losing physical skills. "We may lose those physical skills (but) when you look at the robots we are using, certainly not in the very near term," Mr Gregory said. While existing robots had a clasp that enabled them to perform some simple tasks, it was "nowhere near as dexterous as a human hand". Woodside has embraced robotics, advanced sensor design and deployment, artificial intelligence, data science and visualisation, even collaborating with NASA, as a means of reducing costs and improving the efficiency and safety of its oil and gas operations.

Australia's Woodside Energy had decades of knowledge instilled in its retiring workforce of oil pipeline engineers and wanted to scale that wealth to a much more expansive workforce. When Shelley Kalms, Woodside's Chief Digital Officer, describes her mission to transform her company into a "true learning organization," she's speaking about a "team effort in unlocking the collective intelligence of our organization -- both past and present." Through using IBM Watson, Woodside created the ability to have expansive knowledge at their fingertips. Today's incoming employees in the field have access to as much know-how as a person who has worked on the oil rigs for decades. Today, Woodside has 18 successful Watson-enabled A.I. projects in place, ranging from health to safety -- all of which presents compelling evidence of the potential of A.I. to optimize jobs and increase productivity.

Big data was the first step in creating value from transactions and accumulated data. Now that we have warehouses filled with data the challenge has turned to delivering actionable insights to not just customers, but also employees. Smart businesses have realized that their employees, across teams, can make better decisions and scale expertise by democratizing the access to real-time data insights. These six companies are just a small sampling of how AI is helping companies empower all their employees to be as good as their best ones. H&R Block trains its tax pros to create tax returns for its customers but understanding and interpreting the 74,000 page tax code is daunting.

When IBM's Watson triumphed on Jeopardy! in 2011, it was a major validation of the potential of artificial intelligence and a sign of things to come. But Watson didn't stop there, said IBM's Jay Di Silvestri, speaking at a CDW Summit on "Modernizing IT Infrastructure for Digital Transformation" in Las Vegas on Monday. In the six years since, IBM's AI experts have sought to answer the question, What else can Watson do? "That group immediately turned its sights to say, 'What can we do that is as impressive, but different?'" said Di Silvestri, IBM's Watson platform adoption leader. Watson's next challenge, IBM decided, would be unstructured text, and Di Silvestri said that applications are already on the market for organizations that want to leverage AI to improve customer service and operations. The next phase of Watson is a logical one, he said: deconstructing the technology behind Watson into services that help businesses.

Last month, High's company unveiled Project Intu, an experimental platform that allows developers the ability to build internet of things devices using its artificial intelligence services, like Conversation, Language and Visual Recognition. Someday, the system promises to let programmers create a staple character of sci-fi: the gregarious, hyper-connected AI like J.A.R.V.I.S. of Iron Man, KITT of Knight Rider, or Star Wars' C3PO. High isn't talking about a robot that's conscious or sentient, with genuine feelings, but rather a "cognitive" AI that can analyze the mood and personality of a user and adjust how it expresses itself--in text, voice, online avatars, and physical robots. The result, he says, could transform industries like retail, elder care, and industrial and social robotics. At IBM's 2016 Watson Developer Conference in San Francisco last month, Australian oil- and gas-drilling company Woodside showed an onscreen question-answering AI built with Project Intu.

Representatives from angel investors, venture capital, private equity and corporate venture funds awarded Movus, started by technology strategy consultant Brad Parsons in January 2015, the Investor Award at KPMG Australia's Energise accelerator program last Friday. Having developed an automation monitoring blueprint for BHP Billiton and Aurizon trains and condition monitoring blueprint for Sydney Trains while working for Perth-based Ajilon Australia, Parsons realised the technology was totally applicable for the billions of assets globally that sit below those big heavy assets. Parsons has now developed a condition monitoring sensor that works in the industrial environment picking up the health of machinery using artificial intelligence and a machine learning engine on the backend. It is magnetically attached and can be installed in minutes, the same as a Fitbit for humans. Parsons has already talked about it with Energise sponsors Woodside Petroleum and Chevron Corporation, and will meet Wesfarmers and Western Australia's Water Corporation representatives in Perth in the next fortnight.

Victor David Scheinman, a pioneer in industrial robotics and a longtime Woodside resident, died Tuesday, Sept. 20, of complications of heart disease. Mr. Scheinman, starting as a graduate student at Stanford University, developed a robotic arm that allowed the use of robotics in industry to leap forward. A version of the arm, called the Scheinman Arm, was used for research in dozens of research labs, inspiring a generation of robotics engineers. Stanford professor Bernie Roth, who was at first Mr. Scheinman's adviser at Stanford and later his close friend, said that Mr. Scheinman's robotic arm was unique because it included sensors that gave the feedback to the computer controlling it. Professor Roth said Mr. Scheinman was "tenacious and very active," always trying to figure out how things worked and fixing anything that was broken.

Over the last decade, the "data revolution" has touched every aspect of our work and personal lives. Today's business challenges have never been more complex, and the critical insights that can address these challenges are often buried in an avalanche of data. In today's marketplace, the business that wins, is the business that "thinks." The viability of a company in the marketplace now depends on its ability to use data and analytics to fuel a thinking business. Companies in industries as diverse as healthcare, retail, banking and manufacturing are already using cognitive technologies to reshape business and do things faster and more efficiently than ever before.

What better way to demonstrate the capabilities of IBM's artificial intelligence system, Watson, than to show it working its hardest, and when it really matters? For the film IBM partnered with oil and gas company Woodside, and creative agency the Barbarian Group, to create '70 Miles from Shore with Watson: Woodside Energy and IBM'. The result is a two-minute journey that shows IBM's Watson working and learning, on one of the toughest work sites in the world – an oil rig. To produce a film on such an especially challenging scale required an experienced set of hands, and PSN Australia was enlisted for the job through Production Service Network's U.S. Liaison Carolyn Hill. Choosing to shoot on the rig for real as opposed to a studio levied some strict safety regulations on the team that had not been previously encountered.