The Google Cloud Next 2018 conference took place July 24-26, bringing together the tech giant's cloud leaders to talk about how the company is transforming businesses digitally. From the internet of things (IoT) through to artificial intelligence (AI), there was a lot of discussion...
Research house Strategy Analytics has produced a report, in conjunction with low-power wide-area (LPWA) network provider Actility, that considers the opportunities and the challenges of internet-of-things (IoT) technologies in smart manufacturing, and the broad industrial sector.
The benefits of digital technologies, including advanced data analytics...
A study by the German Academy of Science and Engineering, known as Acatech, provides the most sophisticated blueprint yet for smart manufacturing, and a methodology for companies to rate their industrial transformation.
Acatech's Industrie 4.0 Maturity Index was written for manufacturing companies, specifically, but...
Intel made more than $1 billion in revenue from artificial intelligence (AI) processor chips sold to data centres in 2017. It also said its target market for connectivity, storage and computing products, swelled by the burgeoning internet of things (IoT) space, will widen to...
A new investigation by analyst house ABI Research has ranked the top smart manufacturing platforms, and placed PTC’s ThingWorx top of the pile. PTC has ranked at the top consistently in recent research into the leading digital factory platforms.
ThingWorx scored highest for augmented reality...
The Lean Six Sigma doctrine proposes a set of data-oriented management techniques to eliminate defects and raise quality in process-driven environments. It has become standard in manufacturing. In essence, it describes a process to solve a problem, comprising five basic phases of resolution: to...
Nokia is to offer GE’s CityIQ platform technology to municipalities in Canada to repurpose outdoor street lighting into digital infrastructure, and help with common challenges like parking and traffic management, public safety enhancements, and weather and air quality monitoring.
The CityIQ platform, from GE’s lighting...
Semiconductor maker Intel has applied predictive maintenance to monitor the health of its fan filter units (FFUs) in its semiconductor production facilities through deployment of industrial IoT (IIoT) sensors and edge computing. The idea was to alert technicians to potential problems, define a proactive maintenance...
Finnish network operator Elisa is combining its efforts in artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT) and 5G technologies to stimulate operational excellence in the enterprise market, and drive forward Finland's industrial transformation.
Elisa has selected 13 startups from eight countries to compete for...
Cisco is to invest $100 million in the UK to help the UK government with its ‘industrial strategy’ to become a leading economy for emerging digital technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicles.
As part of the investment, Cisco and University College London (UCL)...
More than 160 companies and organisations from 36 countries working with artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, including the founders of Tesla and Google DeepMind, have signed a pledge not to develop, make, sell or use lethal autonomous weapons.
The signing is the first of its kind,...
Artificial intelligence (AI) will boost jobs during the next two decades, except in manufacturing, transport and city administration. New research finds digital factories, intelligent mobility and smart cities will cause massive disruption in the period to 2037 with as many as one in four...
Siemens has founded an industrial IoT (IIoT) group of manufacturing and technology companies in Italy to expand the international reach of its MindSphere platform.
The new MindSphere World Italy set-up follows a similar industrial grouping in Siemens home market, Germany. The Italian division will also...
GE Digital will integrate its Predix portfolio with Microsoft Azure’s cloud capabilities, and standardise its Predix solutions on Microsoft Azure, it has announced.
GE and Microsoft said they will also work together under the terms of an expanded partnership on the development, marketing, and sales...
Bosch and Daimler will test a fleet of autonomous vehicles in California, with a view to launching a driverless shuttle service on certain routes in the second half of 2019. The pair have selected US tech company Nvidia to provide the artificial intelligence (AI)...
In 2017, a natural gas leak was detected six kilometres off the coast of Nikiski in Alaska. The leak impinged on a critical habitat for endangered beluga whales. The Alaskan authorities sought ways to assess and manage the leakage, and its impact upon the...
In the final instalment in our industrial IoT trilogy with Hitachi, Greg Kinsey, in charge of the company's digital transformation business, says innovation is not available to pre-order and take-away, and the Japanese firm has set up like a Michelin-starred industrial consultancy to transform...
Singapore's industrial development agency JTC has appointed engineering group ST Engineering to build an open smart city platform for its green-field Punggol Digital District (PDD) project, a new tech hub in the north of the city-state, being constructed as a showcase for its Smart...
Siemens has released a cloud-based software suite to help cities manage air pollution. Its new City Air Management (CyAM) solution, based on its MindSphere internet-of-things (IoT) platform, is the “smartest tool available for cities to improve their air quality,” the German industrial giant declared.
CyAM,...
New research by McKinsey Global Institute has evaluated the planet’s smartest cities on both their underlying infrastructure and their over-lying applications, and ranked them in order on both counts. Here, we consider the fist of these measures - the top 10 smart cities, globally,...
The French and UK governments have signed a five-year accord to work together to improve digital services through state-level collaboration on artificial intelligence (AI), data and digital administration.
Mounir Mahjoubi and Matt Hancock, digital secretaries for France and the UK respectively, ratified the deal today...
The move to a ‘lights-out’ factory has already begun, but the developing transition requires an overhaul of industrial facilities, equipment, systems and people if it is to go the distance. Transformation of the manufacturing industry, or ‘vertical’ in service-provider parlance, must also make way...
As we have seen already, through separate discussion of Hitachi’s approach to ‘predictive quality’ and ‘dynamic scheduling’, the digital transformation of industry is multi-faceted. There is a third way, apart from managing defects and bottlenecks, for industrial operatives to set about this change, the...
Microsoft has made its Azure IoT Edge service ‘generally available’, and added new categories including device management and security to its Azure IoT Edge catalogue.
It has also made Azure IoT Edge available on open source developer platform GitHub, which Microsoft acquired for $7.5 billion last...
