Tech Briefs Magazine - February 2024 - 16

Artificial Intelligence
Edward Mehr: There is a perceived
risk of job loss with AI, but at the moment
we have a worker deficit. The industry
simply has a hard time finding
people to do the jobs. We see automation
as a way to bring the employees in, and
in this case, we've never had a situation
where people are resistant to the use of
new technology or AI. Also, new technology
systems require new skills. We're
adding jobs that traditionally weren't in
manufacturing but
rather in the IT industry.
To attract
that skill set to the
manufacturing industry,
we need to
develop a different
culture that manufacturing
is an enticing
place to be.
Jim Eskew: In any manufacturing environment,
the challenges that AI targets
are primarily equipment reliability,
quality control, and safety. This does not
take away from the need to have operators
and maintainers, but rather the
other way around - workers who adopt
the technology will be associated with
improved KPIs. The key to adoption ultimately
is easy access and intuitive applications
for these users. Many applications
of AI can be leveraged with laptops
or even mobile devices. For instance,
visual inspection applications leveraging
computer vision AI algorithms can
be used with a cell phone, comparing
produced parts to design specs similar
to processing a check on a mobile banking
app.
Dheeraj Vemula: As AI continues to
gain traction in the manufacturing industry,
there is a growing demand for
additional data scientists to effectively
analyze and apply the data to ensure the
benefits initially intended are achieved.
No-code or low-code solutions make it
possible for people without much programming
experience to build and deploy
data science models. This can help
to democratize data science and make it
more accessible to everyone, including
knowledge experts in a specific domain
(i.e., design engineers). These no-code
solutions empower users to work with
data analytics models without ever writing
a single line of code. Additionally,
these tools enable data scientists to create
reusable solutions that can be applied
to a wide range of use cases, saving
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time and effort as well as improving the
quality of data science projects. As for
concerns and uncertainties related to AI
and job displacement, certain aspects of
work, particularly in manufacturing, will
get more automated. But to facilitate AI
adoption, you still need " lots " of people,
whose work will be enhanced as they
spend more time on the less time-consuming
tasks and focus more on the strategic
aspects of their role.
The biggest benefit of AI is improving productivity.
Over the next five years, we will see AI adopted the
most where productivity matters the greatest.
is a compelling need to retrieve information
in context quickly, AI will supercharge
the experience. Where this
comes in handy is for operators of large
fleets, i.e. of aircraft, gas turbines, or vehicles,
where this is a high volume of
technical malfunctions, sensors tracking
key measurements, a deep corpus
of documentation describing incidents,
and a variety of parts required to make
repairs. All of this information can be
compared in one
spot, on the fly,
and saved for reference.
The second
key way that
AI will augment
industry is having
- Dheeraj Vemula, Altair
Tech Briefs: How will AI progress over
the next five years? In which industries
will we see the biggest adoption?
Himanshu Iyer: Companies of all sizes
will move to address today's challenges
and future ones by increasingly investing
in and embracing the possibilities of industrial
digitalization and decarbonization.
We're confident that every factory
will be digital-first in order to stay competitive.
By leveraging industrial digitalization
applications such as advanced
simulation and digital twins supported
by AI, manufacturers will be able to
develop new products and services and
unlock speed, agility, and operational
efficiencies across their enterprises and
value chains.
Edward Mehr: Traditionally, aerospace
has been an early adopter of
emerging technology so it will continue
to adopt AI. What will be new are
the horizontal applications of AI in
industries that will open up, especially
where configure to order and customization
is key. We are starting to see that
in HVAC and automotive.
Jim Eskew: AI will progress in two
key ways: First will be a growing comfort
with AI assistants - powered by
LLMs - for virtually all aspects of life.
In particular, multimodality will be key
to unlocking the benefits of generative
AI. In other words, where there are
many different sources of data, those
sources are distributed without logical
relationships between them, and there
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'eyes on' distributed
assets with the
assistance of computer
vision algorithms.
The main benefactor will be
those looking to improve safety and security;
this can be workplace incidences
from hazards, such as suspended loads,
or it could be schools or facilities looking
to protect against would-be attacks.
Dheeraj Vemula: The growth of AI
has been exponential, and the technology
has matured very well already.
Adoption is now catching up. Over
the next five years, we will see AI being
adopted everywhere. Right now, AI
is being applied by only experts and
data scientists, but with the growth of
low-code and no-code solutions, we
will see AI being democratized to everyone
within an organization no matter
their role. The biggest benefit of
AI is improving productivity. Over the
next five years, we will see AI adopted
the most where productivity matters
the greatest. Especially industries like
manufacturing and operations, because
of the data that is available due
to Industry 4.0. We are also seeing early
adoption of AI in healthcare - drug
manufacturing, diagnostics with imaging
etc. That is also likely to accelerate
given the amount of cost savings AI
can provide.
For more information, visit:
www.nvidia.com/en-us/
www.machinalabs.ai
www.sparkcognition.com
www.altair.com
Tech Briefs, February 2024
http://www.nvidia.com/en-us/ http://www.machinalabs.ai http://www.sparkcognition.com http://www.altair.com http://www.techbriefs.com
Tech Briefs Magazine - February 2024

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