Oil and gas sector to get boost from AI system

Oil and gas exploration can get a boost from the efficient deployment of the artificially intelligent computer system, IBM Watson, a renowned data scientist has said.
“Petroleum geology can be accelerated by training IBM Watson on historic data. Nearly every process currently driven by human expertise can be accelerated by its cognitive computing technology,” Romeo Kienzler told Gulf Times in an exclusive interview.
When asked how the cognitive technology that can think like a human can be used effectively in oil exploration in Qatar and the wider region instead of the conventional methods, IBM Watson’s chief data scientist explained the system “can have a look at such vast amounts of structured and unstructured data in seconds which a human brain cannot process in an entire life time.”
In Qatar to take part in a recent event by Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s Qatar Computer Research Institute, Kienzler pointed out that “whenever human expertise is involved in a process, the addition of a cognitive system as an adviser most likely will accelerate the process because information loss is prevented.”
According to the data expert, IBM Watson can be used for enhancing cyber security. “Watson can learn normal behaviour of - for example - network usage patterns - and report when he sees certain behaviour he never or rarely has seen.
IBM Watson is used in health sector too. “Currently IBM Watson Health has two main products; Watson Genomics Adviser and Watson Oncology Adviser. We combine the analysis of DNA and vital sign data which are relatively structured with unstructured data sources like electronic health records and medical publications.”
“In oncology, the treatment is shifting from a brute force approach like chemotherapy or radiotherapy to a more specific approach where individual mutations of a particular tumour cell are targeted by a drug. But currently, the doctors can’t cope with the pure amount of information. So a Watson Adviser will suggest possible treatments to doctors and estimate their success on historic and research data,” he noted.
The official said that Watson is not intelligent on his own. “By transforming knowledge, Watson can create new knowledge in a human consumable form. Key technology in IBM Watson is to understand native language. So Watson can generate a compressed internal representation of text which can be used and test hypothesis,” he explained.
According to the official, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is as accurate as the size of data set available to train. “Data is the new oil and gas and companies like Google and Facebook are aggressively collecting data - just to make AI more accurate. The only limitation in making AI systems as or more accurate than humans is the size of the data available to train,” he added.