Beyond Limit’s 2021 Predictions on Cognitive AI & Knowledge Democratization.

Beyond Limits is a pioneering AI company with a unique legacy from the NASA space program, notably AI technology developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). They enhance software systems developed for NASA/JPL, giving them additional capabilities and hardening them to industrial strength.

We were fortunate to have two of their brilliant minds share their predictions for 2021:

Kim Gilbert, PhD, Manager Technical Commercial Engineering at Beyond Limits

Prediction #1: Cognitive AI technologies will see rapid growth and improvements in the coming years to become more agile, flexible and intelligent when deployed across a variety of new industries.

Details: By unifying machine learning techniques with encoded human knowledge, Cognitive AI advancements will allow users to add to and edit its knowledge base once deployed, and as they do so, the systems will become significantly more flexible and intelligent as it learns by interacting with more domain experts, problems, and data. Eventually, AI systems will be able to identity if decision-makers implemented or declined its recommended actions, if the action taken did what it was supposed to do, and if the system was able to learn from that remediation action.

Prediction #2: Traditional AI technologies will need to become more advanced to solve challenges posed by increasingly complex planning and implementation methods within the utilities industry.

Details: One of these challenges, for instance, is the problem utilities face in managing the many tradeoffs that need to be considered simultaneously while running operations, such as turbine cycling, load balance, asset and equipment constraints. When traditional AI and machine learning solutions are no longer enough, utilities operators will turn to new technologies like Cognitive AI, which is able to provide operators with a global perspective of the plant and plan to make informed decisions when considering numerous tradeoffs, goals, and constraints at the same time.

Michael Krause, PhD, Data Scientist at Beyond Limits

Prediction #1: AI will have a growing impact on the supply chain.

Details: Supply chain is a big challenge and an area that is well suited for AI because there are so many people, companies, and modes of transportation involved. Currently, much of the system is very manual where a person in one location picks up the phone and calls another person in a different location to let them know what truck or ship, carrying what goods, will arrive in their location by what day. The amount of data used and the expansive scale of the supply chain industry makes this a great use case for AI.

Prediction #2:  AI will increasingly benefit the upstream oil & gas industry through the democratization and localization of specialized knowledge in well operations, where domain expert knowledge and experience are extremely valuable yet scarce.

Details: Cognitive AI technology can build a framework that leverages domain expert knowledge by embedding it into the system and then democratizing that knowledge across the organization. The next layer is localizing that knowledge to allow multiple users to modify and add knowledge to the framework based on their unique situation. This is valuable because the AI system will be able to learn from these knowledge inputs and combine the input with data to gain a broader understanding across different assets and different use cases. This will provide decision-makers with a better understanding of the challenges and allow the system to provide better recommendations to solve complex well operations challenges.