This reminds me of some work I did a few years ago in the oil and gas industry. Not nearly as advanced as this, but we essentially read data from sensors in off shore oil rigs and ran it through our system. We had some pretty nifty pattern recognition stuff in place that would learn from previous data in order to become advanced enough to predict imminent sand breaches during drilling.

Given significant warning, it could save the drilling companies lots of money.

Katrina ended up severely damaging the rig we were using for testing and I'm not sure we ever went anywhere with it after that.

We did do some similar work for detecting trace metals in oil sample analysis records in order to recommend maintenance and detect possible future equipment failures.

Anyway, interesting stuff here. I'd love to play around with it.

edit Sorry about the double post. I think I got it removed. Connection was a bit flaky.