Prof. Venkat Venkatasubramanian's AI paper has already been recognized as #1 in the list of Most Read Papers since 2006 at the AIChE Journal website

Mar 04 2019

The promise of artificial intelligence in chemical engineering: Is it here, finally?

The current excitement about artificial intelligence (AI), particularly machine learning (ML), is palpable and contagious. The expectation that AI is poised to “revolutionize,” perhaps even take over, humanity has elicited prophetic visions and concerns from some luminaries.1-4 There is also a great deal of interest in the commercial potential of AI, which is attracting significant sums of venture capital and state‐sponsored investment globally, particularly in China.5 McKinsey, for instance, predicts the potential commercial impact of AI in several domains, envisioning markets worth trillions of dollars.6 All this is driven by the sudden, explosive, and surprising advances AI has made in the last 10 years or so. AlphaGo, autonomous cars, Alexa, Watson, and other such systems, in game playing, robotics, computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing are indeed stunning advances. But, as with earlier AI breakthroughs, such as expert systems in the 1980s and neural networks in the 1990s, there is also considerable hype and a tendency to overestimate the promise of these advances, as market research firm Gartner and others have noted about emerging technology.

 

The full paper can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aic.16489

The promise of artificial intelligence in chemical engineering: Is it here, finally?

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