Daily Archives: June 1, 2017

Pioneer Natural Resources expects AI to be the future, and as it looks to produce 1 million barrels of oil equivalent per day by 2026, it wont need to hire a lot more people. ( amarinchenko106/stock.adobe.com)

Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD) said using artificial intelligence could help ensure it always drills for oil in the best places, as the energy sector embraces technologies that are transforming transportation, e-commerce and finance.

While Tesla (TSLA) has been pursuing autonomous driving and Amazon (AMZN) is pushing its Alexa bot as a personal shopper, the oil industry has been slower to go high tech. But more companies are applying data analytics to oil exploration and production.

Pioneer Natural Resources said Thursday that it isn't using AI yet, though it's been using predictive analytics.

AI would help "narrow the outcomes on these wells," meaning Pioneer could always drill in the sweet spot and avoid duds, Chris Cheatwood, the company's executive vice president for business development and geoscience, told analysts on a conference call.

Pioneer expects AI to be the future, and as it looks to produce 1 million barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) per day by 2026, it won't need to hire a lot more people, he added.

The company and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are also working together to look at advanced materials and coatings, smart parts and sensors, advanced material design, and additive manufacturing, according to a March statement from the lab.

Shares of Pioneer fell 3% to 165.63on the stock market today as a sell-off in oil prices overshadowed its strong quarterly report late Wednesday. Pioneer hit a nine-month low intraday.

U.S. crude sank 4.8% to a five-month low of $45.52 a barrel, back to where prices were before OPEC began its production cuts.

The shale producer swung to an adjusted profit of 25 cents per share in Q1, beating analyst views by 8 cents. Revenue jumped to $1.47 billion, also above views.Total production costs eased to $6.31 per BOEfrom $6.42 in Q4, but costs for Permian horizontal wells climbed 19% sequentially to $2.33 per BOE, and Permian vertical costs rose 2.5% to $14.36. Eagle Ford costs dipped 1.5% sequentially to $10.71.

Production rose 3% vs. Q4 to 249,000 BOE per day, and management sees Q2 output of 254,000-259,000 BOE a day. While some analysts questioned if that guidance was light, Pioneer said its planned addition of wells is weighted toward the latter part of Q2 and the latter part of the year.

Despite the uptick in Permian-area costs, Pioneer doesn't see cost inflation affecting its bottom line this year, noting it has long-term contracts for sand used in fracking and has access to cheap water, though it sees water use in the Permian doubling in 2017 vs. 2014 levels. Labor costs are up 2%-3%.

Also late Wednesday, Continental Resources (CLR) reported adjusted EPS of 2 cents vs. a loss of 41 cents a year ago, in line with Wall Street views. Revenue was $685.43 million, above views for$642.83 million. Production expenses rose 5% vs. Q4 to $3.78 per BOE but were little changed vs. a year ago.

On Thursday, CEO Harold Hamm told analysts during a conference call that service costs are only seeing a slight uptick in a few areas and have stabilized.

Continental seesQ2 production of 220,000-225,000 BOEper day, up from 213,755 in Q1. Fracking crews in the Bakken formation will rise to nine by midyear from seven now.

Despite the recent dive in crude prices, Hamm noted "signs pointing toward better prices very quickly" but added that fracking crews could be withdrawn promptly, depending on market conditions.

Shale companies can extract oil profitably at lower prices due to new technologies and techniques that have improved efficiencies. Continental expects to be cash-flow neutral with U.S. crude at $50-$55 a barrel. Last quarter, it said a price of $55 was the threshold, and in 2015, it was $60.

Shares tumbled 5.1% to 40, hitting their lowest levels sine May 2016.

Also Wednesday, Concho Resources (CXO) reported EPS that crushed Wall Street views but its revenue fell short.

Concho sees full-year production up 21%-25% vs. a prior outlook for growth of 20%-24%. Oil and natural gas production expense per barrel of oil equivalent is now $5.50-$6.00, down from a prior outlook of $5.75-$6.25.

Shares dropped 1.3% to 127.11.

On Tuesday, Diamondback Energy (FANG) reportedQ1 results above views as production rose 61%. Devon Energy (DVN) also reported a profit and announced $1 billion in asset sales primarily in the Barnett Shale basin.

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This Chart On U.S. Oil Production Shows Why OPEC Is Trapped

The International Energy Agency warned last week that merely extending the deal won't be enough to bring markets in balance. Instead, deeper cuts are needed. (philipus/stock.adobe.com)

5/22/2017 OPEC is likely to extend its production cuts at the group's biannual meeting Thursday, but questions remain on the duration,...

5/22/2017 OPEC is likely to extend its production cuts at the...

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Shale Producer Eyes Drilling With Artificial Intelligence ...

Forbes

Is Apple Secretly Working On AI Chips For The Next iPhone? Forbes Creating artificial intelligence that marvels and excites people has never been an easy job, but it has always been one that Apple Inc. has been good at. The company's virtual assistant for smartphones, commonly known as Siri, was the first of its kind ...

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Is Apple Secretly Working On AI Chips For The Next iPhone? - Forbes

By Matthew HutsonJun. 1, 2017 , 2:30 PM

The life of a sheep is not as cushy as it looks. They suffer injury and infection, and cant tell their human handlers when theyre in pain. Recently, veterinarians have developed a protocol for estimating the pain a sheep is in from its facial expressions, but humans apply it inconsistently, and manual ratings are time-consuming. Computer scientists at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom have stepped in to automate the task. They started by listing several facial action units (AUs) associated with different levels of pain, drawing on the Sheep Pain Facial Expression Scale. They manually labeled these AUsnostril deformation, rotation of each ear, and narrowing of each eyein 480 photos of sheep. Then they trained a machine-learning algorithm by feeding it 90% of the photos and their labels, and tested the algorithm on the remaining 10%. The programs average accuracy at identifying the AUs was 67%, about as accurate as the average human, the researchers will report today at the IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition in Washington, D.C. Ears were the most telling cue. Refining the training procedure further boosted accuracy. Given additional labeled images, the scientists expect their method would also work with other animals. Better diagnosis of pain could lead to quicker treatment.

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Artificial intelligence learns to spot pain in sheep - Science Magazine

If any of us are still alive in the year 2100, we'll likely look back on artificial intelligence as the definitive development of the 21st century. Then we'll have a robot write a blog post about it for us.

There is a 50 percent chance that AI be able to perform all human tasks better than humans in 45 years, and all human jobs are expected to be automated within the next 120 years, according toa survey of 352 AI researchers who published at either theConference on Neural Information Processing Systems or the International Conference on Machine Learning in 2015. The survey was conducted by the University of Oxford and Yale University.

"Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will transform modern life by reshaping transportation, health, science, finance, and the military," reads the study."To adapt public policy, we need to better anticipate these advances."

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Related: How artificial intelligence will cure America's health care system

Survey respondents predict that AI will be able to translate languages better than humans by 2024, write high schoollevel essays by 2026, drive trucks by 2027, work in retail by 2031, write books by 2049 and perform surgery by 2053. Most recently, an AI developed by Google defeated the world's best player in Go, a complex strategy game. In 2011, IBM's Watson AI famously won a game of Jeopardy! against the world's best players. AIs have been beating world champions in chess since 1997, when IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov.

The most paradigm-shifting AI development that looks to be coming down the pike is the large-scale proliferation of self-driving cars. Transportation innovators like Uber's Travis Kalanick and Tesla's Elon Musk have predicted that automated vehicles will disrupt the industry over the course of the next 20 years, and Musk estimates "it will be very unusual" for cars that aren't autonomous to be manufactured in the next decade. While it's fun to watch machines win board games, automated transportation will have a dramatic impact on the world economy, as driving in various forms is one of the planet's largest sources of jobs.

In a recent cover story, Newsweek's Kevin Maney detailed several of the ways AI will transform health care, such as AI software that understands a person's genetic makeup being able to diagnose illnesses. Researchers are just now beginning to understand the ways in which automation can interact with the human body, and the impact AI will have on the health industry in the coming decades is impossible to estimate, except the idea that it will be significant.

Many, including Musk, have argued that the rise in automation will force governments to establish a "universal basic income," as so many jobs will be replaced by machines that unemployment will reach unprecedented levels.

The reality is that AI will have a dramatic impact on all aspects of people's lives, and it's going to happen sooner than most of us realize. Theconsensus arrived at by the world's top AI researchers bears this out. Admittedly, it's a little frightening, especially if you have a job that involves anything technique-based or formulaic. Yes, that includes bloggers.

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Will AI Take Over? Artificial Intelligence Will Best Humans at Everything by 2060, Experts Say - Newsweek

In Brief Researchers are studying how bilingual humans switch between languages to bridge the gap in human/AI interaction. Work like this will help AI seem more human as it becomes more and more prevalent in our lives. Bridging The Gap

It might sound impressive that artificial intelligence (AI) powers virtual assistants such as Alexa and Siri but when it comes to their ability to converse using natural language, theyre actually still quite limited. Thats why Microsoft is trying a new tactic.

Microsofts Project Mlange, housed in its India office, is using code-mixing (moving between multiple languages within a distinct conversation or even a single sentence) to teach AI how to have more human-like conversations. India is a perfect location for this work, because its a multi-lingual society in which many people are mixing languages regularly. Using big data analytics and machine learning in realtime, the company is enabling virtual assistants to understand various accents, contexts, languages, and nuances.

The researchers are hoping that teaching machines how to interpret code-mixing could help them develop better customization and improved opinion mining skills. Right now, the researchers for this study are using Twitter data to study the ways users switch between languages. Interestingly, existing research already shows that bilingual Indian men switch to Hindi from English when expressing abuse or negative sentiments. In contrast, bilingual women seem to stick with the language they started the conversation in even if the comments turn negative.

Virtual assistant systems are not currently able to pick up on multiple languages within a single conversation, and the ability to do so is a fairly high-level skill.For now, the researchers need to focus on acquiring enough data for them to study the language patterns that are of interest. However, it is likely to take years for a voice-powered virtual assistant to be able to engage in code-switching as well as a human can.

As AI becomesmore prevalent in every aspect of our lives, this kind of research is becoming increasinglyimportant.For example, International Data Corporation estimates that global spending on AI and cognitive solutions will increase significantly within the next few years, and predicts that by 2020 it might achieve a compound annual growth rate of 54.4%.

Microsoft researcher Kalika Bali told CNBC. I think this would definitely help to bridge the gap in the human-computer interaction. The fact that you can actually talk to a machine the way you would normally talk to your friend is something we still need to wrap our heads around.

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Microsoft is Working to Make Artificial Intelligence More Human - Futurism

Events Were thrilled to reveal the first batch of conference speakers for the Minds Mastering Machines (M3) three-day dive into machine learning, AI and advanced analytics this autumn.

The event is on October 9, 10, and 11 in London and features keynotes from Googles Melanie Warrick and professor Mark Bishop of Goldsmiths, University of London.

Melanie is a senior developer advocate at Google, and her career has included work as a founding engineer on Deeplearning4j as well as work implementing machine learning (ML) in production at Change.org.

Marks career has spanned academic breakthroughs from (arguably) the first computational swarm intelligence (SI) paradigm, to advising the United Nations on the control of killer robots, to applying AI to fraud detection and procurement.

They are far from the only highlights. Were pulling together a wide range of experts, who will help you not just grasp the potential of these technologies, but show you how theyve put them into practice in real-world businesses you can see the emerging lineup on the M3 website here.

We've got more than 25 speakers confirmed on what we expect to be a line-up of around 40 in total, plus some workshop tutors to add into the mix. This gives us an already packed programme that includes introductory sessions covering key concepts and platforms for those in the early stages of adopting and adapting ML, advanced analytics and AI.

For those already moving in these areas we have deeper dives into key tools and how theyre being used in organisations from retail to online commerce, research, and of course, transport. And everyone will benefit from sessions covering the ethical, legal and management contexts around ML, AI and associated technologies.

Were even taking a few glimpses into the wilder possibilities offered by these potentially revolutionary technologies. Throughout, the focus will be on how ML and AI can be applied in real businesses and organisations, a theme that will be carried on in our day-three workshop lineup.

These are mind-stretching and occasionally mind-blowing topics, so youll be glad to know well enjoy a supply of high-quality food and drink to keep you going in the conference sessions, and to oil those crucial offline conversations with the speakers and your fellow attendees.

You can find out much more, and grab those all-important early bird tickets, over on the M3 website now.

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Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence experts gather in London - The Register