Artificial intelligence in Chemical industry

Artificial intelligence in Chemical industry:

Artificial Intelligence particularly Machine Learning has created intense excitement across industries. In 1956, at a math conference in Dartmoth college, the term artificial intelligence (AI) was first coined1. According to researchers, Artificial Intelligence is the study of making a computer do things better than that done by humans. Some of the examples of AI are AlphaGo, AlphaGo Zero, self driving car, speech recognition and natural language processing like Siri and Alexa2.

In terms of AI’s application in the chemical manufacturing sector, it can accurately decipher the future prices of raw materials. The innovation through digitization certainly helps to adjust the processes involved in production, boosts productivity in R&D, eventually speeds up the availability of finished products to the market and significantly reduces the undue losses caused to the company due to dynamic fluctuation of raw material prices.

AI used in the chemical industry is far more accurate than the typical human forecasting and substantially reduces the error. AI is competent enough to solve complex business problems, fasten the intricate and time consuming research methods and steps. It also facilitates scientific computations that could not have been thought of or may have been previously impossible to execute.

AI aids chemical organizations to take the best possible and smart decisions effectively on a proactively prompt basis. AI can have a huge impact on shaping and restructuring the chemical manufacturing industry, optimizing the involved production cycle to a next level, auto detecting the low quality outputs at a pretty early stage, contributing largely towards reducing the wastage of chemicals required in production, thus ultimately maintaining greater efficiency and ensuring higher levels of productivity.

These AI led practices benefit the company to have an increased competitive advantage and decreases the cost significantly through optimization in the operational procedures and assists in the up scaling processes. AI has a vital role in Data management and Analytical reasoning based decision making. AI offers superior comprehension and customization based on the various needs and wants of customers, personalizing and optimizing the products that are being offered thus contributing towards company's progress.

AI provides digitally enhanced product offerings which is of utmost importance for product performance in consumer markets. AI finds its application in constructive product and process development stages to accelerate product innovation.

One such product innovation, a robot, is used by Novartis3 for cleaning production substances to minimize human contact to toxins, also to run testing on products 24*7 thus speeding up the discovery of new drugs. Dow chemicals use AI monitoring to detect and eliminate impurity4, colour difference and damaged packaging. Pfizer aims to leverage AI and data science to identify new and precise treatment options5; redefine and speed up the completion time of chemical studies for new product development.

AI is proving its worth in academic research as well. Researchers at MIT have designed a deep learning model combining in sillico prediction and empirical investigation, that predicts antibacterial molecule from drug re-purposing hub, named Halicin6. It has bactericidal activity against Mycobacterium tuberculosis and carbapenem resistant Enterobacteriaceae. This adds to currently shrinking collection of antibacterial molecules against which many microbes are growing resistant.

Another example of AI application in the field of biology is identification of microbes. AI is advantageous as the conventional biochemical and microbiological methodology are laborious and time consuming. Researchers have used multivariate statistical tools along with machine learning to identify molecular pattern in Raman spectra which is used to identify molecular composition. The scientists have developed algorithm that identifies the difference between different class of bacteria7. The above mentioned list is not exhaustive as AI is constantly evolving, and many important discoveries are yet to be made. Considering its enormous potential, AI will change the paradigm of many organizations in the long run.

References:
1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.01.021
2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules24244516