[HN Gopher] Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligen...
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Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence in Industry
4.0
Author : TiagoEckhardt
Score : 38 points
Date : 2021-10-03 15:42 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencedirect.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencedirect.com)
| tuatoru wrote:
| In my Systems Analysis course back in the 1980s, at one point the
| instructor said something along the lines of "we could just
| automate the existing processes by taking the existing documents,
| making digital copies of them, and writing code to analyze them.
| But no-one would do that, because it's stupid."
|
| Here we are.
| TiagoEckhardt wrote:
| Taking into account the technological evolution of the last
| decades and the proliferation of information systems in society,
| today we see the vast majority of services provided by companies
| and institutions as digital services. Industry 4.0 is the fourth
| industrial revolution where technologies and automation are
| asserting themselves as major changes.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| For the uninitiated, the term "Robotic Process Automation" isn't
| about physical/articulating robots performing tasks that interact
| with their environment. It's a term used to describe something
| much more akin to back-office software automation in most cases.
| vorhemus wrote:
| In my opinion a complete misuse of the term "robotic".
| Similarly how the term "AI" was (and is) abused by tech
| companies marketing departments.
| homarp wrote:
| robotic as in "resembling or characteristic of a robot,
| especially in being stiff or unemotional."
|
| Basically, it makes it clear that RPA is just macro
| recording, without any 'subtlety' or margin of errors (one
| pixel shift will break RPA)
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Calling it "macro recording" would make it maximally clear
| that this was macro recording, I think.
| T0Bi wrote:
| But that's just wrong. Most RPA Software (like UiPath) uses
| selectors for web and desktop automation. You can use
| static or dynamic selectors, anchors and lots of other
| techniques to tell the bot where to click/type.
|
| It's very dynamic and a well written bot will work even
| after changes to the website or software. Also, pure RPA is
| usually only used on legacy software without any other
| APIs, so they rarely change.
|
| Source: RPA/IPA Dev
| leetrout wrote:
| I really like IBMs marketing of Watson as cognitive computing
| / cognitive enhancement / cognitive assistance.
| pantulis wrote:
| I like to think of it as glorified VBA macros, as most software
| of this class runs on top of Windows automating desktop apps.
| smarx007 wrote:
| I think there is no place for RPA in Industry 4.0 or any kind of
| high tech architectures (ML/cloud/insert buzzword here). If you
| are using RPA, it means that your IT infra does not even have
| (usable) APIs to begin with and you have to resort to mouse-
| clicking and other hacky approaches offered by RPA. First, get
| rid of software that holds your data hostage and cannot be
| controlled via APIs before you start thinking about "AI".
|
| P.S. Congratulations on paper acceptance!
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Well, if you had AI that really was intelligent, it would be
| cool to have AI agents figure out your repetitive tasks as well
| as the structure of data in some giant IT app, and then turn
| this into a better, streamlined and automatable/automated App.
| The only problem is that AI is nowhere near that now and
| plausibly won't be there for a while.
| Animats wrote:
| Right. What is meant here by "Robotic process automation" here
| is screen scraping in difficult cases.
|
| I used to have to do that. Around 1999 I had a nightmare
| written in Perl which could scrape human-readable financial
| statements in text or HTML filed with the SEC to extract a few
| basic numbers. All financial statements have roughly the same
| data, but they're all formatted differently. I used to have a
| database with a sizable list of euphemisms for "net loss". For
| a while, the SEC made companies submit that information in XML,
| which they did badly. Then the SEC removed that requirement.
| Then they re-instated it with a better system, which is where
| everybody gets that data now. It took about 15 years before
| everybody was on board with this.
| Closi wrote:
| > First, get rid of software that holds your data hostage and
| cannot be controlled via APIs before you start thinking about
| "AI".
|
| The paper is talking about using AI to improve screen-scraping
| performance for RPA frameworks, which is definitely a valid use
| case.
|
| As nice as it would be to always replace legacy systems with
| APIs, sometimes you have a job to do and need to get it done!
| If you are hired to build something and it needs to integrate
| with some windows application which can only be accessed via
| Citrix which you are not able to touch, then these tools come
| into their own (not as the preferred architectural choice, but
| as the only remaining practical option).
| PeterisP wrote:
| "get rid of software that holds your data hostage" - that can
| _easily_ take an order of magnitude more money and time to do
| than implementing a screen scraping solution as an integration
| workaround.
|
| I've seen my share of software like that. "Getting rid" of it
| may be a valuable thing in some cases, but it's not something
| you do "first", it's a strategic decision with an
| organizational transformation that will definitely take years
| to suceed and may be fail or be cancelled; it's something you
| might start but you may as well move on to a different position
| before it's finished. On the other hand, RPA is something you
| may actually achieve yourself in a reasonable timeframe.
| specialist wrote:
| Weird article. Apparently Robotic Process Automation is reducing
| repetitive tasks.
|
| 80+ years into the Information Age. And we're still confused.
|
| Automation is not digitization. Most everyone conflates the two.
|
| Automation is the removal of human judgement. This generally
| means simplification. All those biz pop terms like "business
| process reengineering".
|
| Digitization is using computers to do tasks previously performed
| by humans.
|
| IT (data processing) projects that set out to replace legacy
| systems, whether paper-based or prior software, generally fail.
| Because they do not first simplify the work being done. But
| rather attempt to fork lift current work onto a new media.
|
| In other words, digitization without prior automation.
|
| --
|
| As for the selection of tools listed for Robotic Process
| Automation, they're fine mitigations.
|
| When one cannot or will not first simplify, the minions are
| reduced to relying on shims and screen scrapping.
|
| Ever more, I think most grand efforts like simplification,
| understanding, semantics, ontologies, and data interchange are
| quixotic. Just log everything and let future minions ferret out
| whatever interesting bits they might need.
|
| In other words, enable future software systems archaeologists and
| forensics teams to better mine the data, and don't try to code
| for the ages.
| karimtr wrote:
| The reality is that RPA, AI, ML, etc ... are still years away
| when it comes to the industrial sectors (e.g. manufacturing,
| energy, oil & gas, etc).
|
| Sure there are many PoCs, smaller projects, but in my experience,
| working on data centric projects with a few fortune 500
| industrial companies, none of these technologies have been
| successfully implemented in production.
|
| Perhaps for some back office & business-level applications, but
| certainly not for any production related use-cases (e.g.
| predictive maintenance).
| pantulis wrote:
| My take is that RPA by itself is useful as most big companies
| have mind blowingly manual processes in their back offices (or
| even worse they don't have mapped their processes).
|
| The combination of RPA with AI/ML, usually called "Intelligent
| Process Automation" is merely dropping some OCR or NLP engine
| here and there to help in points of the workflow when there is
| no other possiblity other than some person reading a document
| and trying to come up with the next step. Calling this "AI" is
| a stretch.
| pantulis wrote:
| Oh and don't get me started with the McKinsey quotes the
| likes of "workforce doing clerical work will be liberated to
| do higher value tasks".
|
| They are simply going to be fired --if you squint a little
| while reading the slides you see that is precisely the
| business case.
|
| That's going to be technology for the rest of the office
| workforce in the next few years.
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