GE and BP with Machine Learning

Deep Machine Learning: GE And BP Will Connect Thousands Of Subsea Oil Wells To The Industrial Internet ... 

That magic is also the idea behind a new partnership between BP and GE’s Intelligent Platforms unit. Next year, BP will use GE’s Predix software platform to connect 650 wells to the Industrial Internet. If all goes according to plan, the companies will expand the scope to 4,000 BP subsea wells around the world. “We will help them to get connected, get insights and get optimized,” says Kate Johnson, CEO of GE Intelligent Platforms Software. ... " 

GE to Roll Out Predix Asset Management

Have been following Predix, was a beta user.   Managing Assets in the IoT is important

GE to roll out its Predix Asset Performance Management software at its monitoring, diagnostic center  .... By rolling out APM to its monitoring and diagnostic center, it will be able to tap into utility sensor data around the world for more predictive abilities. .... "    By Larry Dignan in ZDNet

Apple and GE Join for Industrial Mobile IOS

Apple isn't known for industrial, so this is an interesting spin.   Note also the predictive spin using I assume machine learning.  Much more about the work at the link.   I was an early tester of GE Predix, and its aimed at this kind of application.   See much more at tags on it here.

Apple and GE join forces to build industrial apps for mobile devices   By Maria Deutscher

 Apple Inc. and General Electric Co., two companies that have vastly different business priorities most of the time, are joining forces in the mobile market.

With a new partnership announced this morning, the two companies will collaborate on targeting professionals in the industrial sector who use iOS devices for their work. The alliance revolves around Predix, the cloud platform that GE has developed to help organizations analyze sensor data from physical assets such as manufacturing equipment. According to the company, this information can be employed for everything from usage tracking to predicting technical problems in advance.  .... " 
And more in TechRepublic.

How Will GE Adapt to Change?

Will be interesting to follow. They impressed me as a talented group, but also lumbering about as a big company without paying enough attention to good standards.  Will their Predix system take them in the right direction? In Knowledge@Wharton.

Intelligent Edge Computing

HPE and GE Digital try to break IT/OT silos for intelligent edge computing   by R. Danes  

" ... an interview at HPE Discover in Las Vegas, Nevada, Anthony Rokis (pictured, right), vice president of software engineering, Predix, at GE Digital, agreed that the edge must get smarter to fulfill IoT’s promise.

GE and and HPE are converging on IoT edge and compute strategies, Rokis told John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio ... " 

GE and BlockChain to Provide Predix Solutions

As energy markets change, GE, blockchain hope to provide economic solutions
New additions to the Predix platform are targeted at energy traders and grid managers.  By Megan Guess

Energy traders are a less visible part of the market compared to retail and wholesale power suppliers. They exist in certain markets to bid on the constantly fluctuating price of electricity, which is useful for owners of power-generating plants to help, for example, lock in a price for electricity in the day ahead.

As more and more renewable energy comes onto the grid, energy traders, utilities, and power-generating companies have to grapple with a much more complex electricity market. Intermittent resources like wind and solar will be sold at certain times of the day, and fossil fuel-based power will be sold at other times of the day. Because some larger fossil fuel-based plants can’t just shut off at a moment’s notice and many renewable sources depend on weather, balancing supply and demand is an increasingly complicated issue. That balance is further complicated by how most markets don’t have vast energy storage resources to draw on, and electricity has to be consumed as soon as it’s made. ... " 

GE Digital Introduces Foundry Startups

Recently presented with GE Digital, so this approach is of interest.   See my previous posts on GE Digital and in particular Digital Twins and Predix.

GE digital facility in Paris introduces its first set of startups to customers    by Karl Flinders

GE has introduced the first set of companies to graduate from its European startup hub, with five startups making pitches to potential customers.

The hub, known as GE Digital Foundry Europe, was set up last summer. It is the company’s first digital-focused hub in Europe, with California and India its main locations before this. Its role is to select and support startups as they develop applications for GE’s industrial internet analytics platform, known as Predix. .... " 

GE on Digital Industrial Transformations

Considerable detail at the link, including a blog.   Looking forward to see their talk relating to this next Friday.   Considerable detail at the link below:

Digital industrial transformation is a process – a road we travel on our journey to reduced downtime, higher productivity, culture change, and new business models and revenue streams. In that vein, I think of Minds + Machines this year as a stop on the road – a place to consult the map, compare notes with friends, and then get back in the car and keep on truckin’.

Minds + Machines also got me thinking about what’s on the road ahead. Here are some trends that I picked up in my conversations with customers, partners, industry luminaries, and innovators at our conference, which I believe will accelerate in 2017.

Customers showing the way forward

Our customers work with us because we help them improve productivity, with Predix, our operating system for industry, as the foundation. But the benefits flow both ways. We’re increasingly seeing our customers adapt the cloud-based platform-as-a-service to their needs and create new apps and solutions that can benefit the entire ecosystem. Their feedback as they ascend the digital maturity curve even helps us refine our own ongoing transformation.

By partnering with companies like the elevator and mobility solutions giant Schindler Group, for example, we see Predix optimize a whole new world of industrial machines. And with the new Predix Edge System, which puts apps on the machines themselves so they can self analyze more quickly, we can introduce apps to all kinds of machines. That means we could have apps running on every elevator in Schindler’s fleet, constantly optimizing their operation at the point of service. I’m excited to see where the technology is going to go next.  .....  "

An Overview of GE Predix

Largely nontechnical overview, rather than a review of Predix as a platform. .  Prompted me to take another look.  I was an early tester.  GE is a big part of the Industrial Internet.

IoT Platform Review - Predix (GE)
Predix: The Industrial Internet Platform     by Erik Walenza-Slabe  

AI Software Booming

Short NYT piece that mentions a number of AI software efforts.  But this seems to be a mix of analytics and data science with Cognitive/AI.   True these two domains will often be mixed in application, but they should be separately understood.   Machine learning is a technique and data focused approach.  Cognitive/AI systems are adaptable and learning systems than can interact with language, leveraging structured knowledge.  Note that its not the data used that has to be structured, but the semantic knowledge in context that needs to be.  So something like IBM Watson attempts this, but GE Predix does not.

GE Buys Machine Analytics Firm

Today, GE Digital, the company’s software arm, said it acquired Meridium, Inc., a leading developer of asset performance management (APM) software for machine-heavy industries such as oil, gas, electricity and chemicals. The deal values Meridium, based in Roanoke, Virginia, at $495 million.

GE first invested in Meridium in 2014, buying a quarter of the company. Today it purchased the remaining stake. “As we forge ahead in the Industrial Internet journey, APM is clearly the first application that can leverage the Predix platform to help industrial customers benefit from increased productivity,” said Bill Ruh, CEO of GE Digital. ... " 

Connected Volcanoes

Volcanoes have been linked to sensors for a long time.    And connected to the internet as well.   I like the new connections to advanced analytics,  Data is not yet available.   I plan to connect to this volcano.   In Adage:

GE Creates World's First 'Connected Volcano'
Hooks Up Sensors to Nicaraguan Volcano; Shares on Social Media  By Kate Maddox

Digital industrial company GE, which has been at the forefront of using new technologies to tell its story, is creating the world's first "connected volcano" and sharing the journey on social media.
GE's sensors will capture data from an active volcano.

To do this, GE is partnering with explorer Sam Cossman at Qwake, a company that combines global expeditions with cutting-edge technology. GE is the digital and software partner for an expedition Mr. Cossman is leading in Nicaragua to connect sensors to a live volcano in order to gather data for early warning systems and other purposes.

"We are leveraging Predix, GE's industrial internet software, to help build the foundation of a digital ecosystem Mr. Cossman and his team at Qwake are putting in place at the volcano," said Sydney Williams, global digital marketing manager at GE. ... " 

Predix Opening to Development

GE Opening Development.
 " ... General Electric has more than a century of industrial experience, but its five-year-old GE Digital division hopes to leverage outside expertise in its IoT mission. This week the company is hosting the first developer conference for its GE Predix software platform, where it will announce developer kits to help get the ball rolling on new IoT projects.

Predix started as an internal tool for GE to monitor products like jet engines that it had already built and sold. Now the company is offering it to others as a platform for capturing and analyzing data about all kinds of industrial assets. It can collect many kinds of information about those assets and, with customers’ permission, combine inputs from many users to learn things like when a piece of factory equipment is likely to fail. ... " 

GE Predix for Big Data and Analytics

Starting to get an introduction to Predix.  Impressive so far.  Look forward to see its broad availability.  See my other posts this year on Predix development and how it relates to analytic methods.  Note the paper talks about its relationship to the Industrial Internet.

" ... Connect. Optimize. Win.
A Software Platform for the Next Industrial Era

Powered by Predix, the next generation of industrial applications will bring together IT and OT, big data and advanced analytics, social business technologies, cloud deployment, and mobile-centric user interfaces..... 

White Paper with registration. 

Pitney Bowes Location Intelligence

Back in the enterprise we used the Mapinfo GIS system for location and mapping.    They were acquired by Pitney Bowes.  Now that location intelligence system is used by GE in its Predix platform.  The Mapinfo Pro systems still exist.  This is a useful integration of GIS and location analytics.  They write:

" ... What is Location Intelligence?
Location Intelligence is the capability to understand complex relationships between location and data in order to drive better business decisions. It enables organizations to derive meaningful insight by harnessing the power of location to solve business problems, deliver location-based services or manage assets. ... "

GE Predix Cloud Predicts Machine Failures

We worked on a similar project in collaboration with Los Alamos Labs. In particular to do reliability and failure prediction for systems that were composed of elements that only rarely failed.   So called 'Black Swans'.    This was eventually licensed out via a third party.  Examining the difference between the ideas.   Will report back here with more information.  A related project looked at out of stock condition on a store shelf as a failure that could be predicted by multiple sensory inputs.

Pointer to some of the above work in R&D Magazine.
This was eventually offered for use by KPMG Consulting. in 2005.

In FastCompany:
GE wants to give industrial machines their own social network with Predix Cloud ... GE is selling a new service that promises to predict when a machine will break down, so technicians can preemptively fix it. .... "

GE's Industrial Internet

In SiliconAngle:

General Electric Co. (GE) has made no secret of its desire to become the ruler of what it calls the “Industrial Internet,” a concept that’s often described as the Internet of Things for big industry. But to do that, GE needs to refashion itself as one of the biggest players in IT, and no IT player is complete without a cloud to handle all of those applications and data.

Which is why GE formally announced Predix Cloud yesterday, a version of its Predix machine data analytics software that’s now available as a cloud-based service. ... " 

Pitney Bowes and GE Software's Predix

It is nice to see the terms predictive and prescriptive used specifically here, the prescriptive is not that often mentioned.  It implies the integration of analytics and specific business process, which is good. Have not looked at GE's Predix.

GE, Pitney Bowes team up on predictive and prescriptive analytics
The two companies will use GE's Predix software platform for the Industrial Internet of Things to develop customized asset performance management applications.

GE and Pitney Bowes are going to bring the power of predictive and prescriptive analytics to mail production mail.

The two companies today sealed an alliance around GE's Predix software platform for the Industrial Internet, under which they will develop customized asset performance management (APM) applications for Pitney Bowes and its Enterprise Business Solutions customers. Powered by Predix, the services is designed to give Pitney Bowes the capability to analyze data generated from its production mailing and shipping machines, and its clients' machines, to provide client and productivity services and job scheduling capabilities. ...   "