If a machine can think, decide and act on its own volition, if it can be harmed or held responsible for its actions, should we stop treating it like property and start treating it more like a person with rights?

PACE spoke with David Hegarty, managing director Rockwell Australia and New Zealand about how IoT represents a real jumping-off point for innovation, what it means for manufacturers in the Oceania region and some tips on moving forward to embrace a new era of business with connectivity and analytics as the driving force.

In our ongoing series talking to industry leaders, we have a chat with Solgen Energy Group executive general manager David Naismith about renewable energy, the solar industry and the challenges borne out of the growing solar power storage sector.

These sensor-enabled, advanced robots are now able to undertake more complicated tasks and are being deployed into industrial, commercial, domestic, logistic and other sectors where robot penetration was previously limited, with the market for robotic vision and force sensing alone expected to reach over $16.1 billion by 2027.

Australian business is calling for certainty in energy and climate policy: that’s one thing they can’t be certain they’ll get this year. But there will be some useful groundwork.

While the language of innovation may have once soothed fears and inspired confidence, the term’s overuse means it now operates as clichéd husk – a fashionable accessory that politicians begrudgingly don when they want to convey a particular message.

The fourth industrial revolution brings us the convergence of effectively unlimited computer power, ever-smarter artificial intelligence (AI) and globalisation. These technologies will combine to challenge our understanding of what it means to be a worker, and even what it means to be human.

There’s a new industrial revolution just around the corner, driven by artificial intelligence and robotics. Deterioration within the key institutions of suffrage, education, and land policy indicate that Australia may be one of the countries left behind this time.

A raft of South Australian companies are taking their sustainable water cleaning technologies and selling them to the world.

Liberal MP Craig Kelly has claimed that businesses and households in Australia are paying twice as much as Americans for their electricity. Is this true?

For decades, deterrence has effectively countered the threat of nuclear weapons. Can we achieve similar results against cyber weapons?

Radiologists still rely on visual inspection of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or X-ray scans – although IBM and others are working on this issue – and doctors have no access to AI for guiding and supporting their diagnoses.

Faced with the rise of renewable energy and limits on carbon pollution, The Conversation has asked experts what kind of future awaits the grid.

Faced with the rise of renewable energy and limits on carbon pollution, The Conversation has asked experts what kind of future awaits the grid.

Recently, PACE spoke to industry stalwart Dirk Kuiper, General Manager of AMS Instrumentation & Calibration about where the process and control sector is heading in light of the many changes we are witnessing across the manufacturing and industrial sectors.

Water produced when coal seam gas (CSG) is extracted from below ground can be safely re-injected hundreds of metres underground, according to new CSIRO research.

Collecting the wealth of data created by sensors and actuators in factories is vital to working smarter, though we’re currently only harnessing maybe a 20th of what’s being produced. Jas Singh from ifm Efector shares some thoughts about using the rest.

Researchers have built a machine that sends messages using common chemicals. Among many potential applications, this system could relay secret messages or allow tiny devices to communicate inside the human body.

All our lives we have relied on batteries in everything from mobile phones and cars to hand torches, but confidence in the technology has deteriorated of late.

Melbourne’s transport uses 311 billion litres of water each year – equivalent to flooding the city’s centre 8 metres deep. That’s just one of the findings of a new study looking at how much water different modes of transport use.