How AI is building better gas stations and transforming Shell’s global energy business
Imagine a man lighting a cigarette while he’s waiting at the pump for his car to finish fueling at a Shell gas station in Singapore, unaware that with one move he could cause a fire or explosion. An onsite video camera captures the scene, and a device inside the station running Microsoft Azure IoT Edge can now use artificial intelligence tools to pick out that behavior — out of all the cars coming and going, drivers cleaning windshields, customers buying snacks — as a potential safety risk. It’s a first line of defense on the “intelligent edge,” where data is quickly processed close to where it’s collected, without accessing the cloud, and simple machine learning algorithms can dispense with anything that’s not of interest. They can also be trained to look for other high-risk incidents: people driving recklessly, theft, improper fueling. Questionable frames are immediately uploaded to the Microsoft Azure cloud, which can power more sophisticated deep learning AI models. These...
