Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises better, more human-like decision-making and more autonomous operation, yet 87% of machine learning models never make it to production. The disconnect between AI technologists (IT) and industrial stakeholders (OT, from executive to the plant floor) significantly drives this failure. This disconnect shows itself as a lack of common understanding of AI capabilities, lack of common terminology to discuss AI solutions, and no framework for discussing AI Automation at various organizational altitudes.

The audience for this course is industrial stakeholders that own and operate industrial processes. This includes business executives, innovation teams, plant / line managers, process engineers, controls engineers, line supervisors, and industrial data scientists. We will provide a 101-level introduction that helps industrial stakeholders like you navigate the confusing AI landscape. The course arms will arm you with context that helps you select technologies, service providers, and vendors that will help you improve your manufacturing and logistics process control. The result is the foundation of building AI-powered automation that passes the ethics, explainability, and trust criteria needed to reach production and significant return on investment.

The course has been designed and will be presented by Kence Anderson, AI author and start-up founder, formerly with Microsoft Bonsai. 

COURSE OUTLINE:

• How Machines Make Decisions
• How AI Can Improve Industrial Automation
• AI for Perception: How Machine Learning Helps You Understand What's Happening
• AI for Taking Action: Reinforcement Learning Decides What to Do
• Deploying AI-Powered Automation
• Capstone Exercise

Kence Anderson

CEO & Co-Founder
Composabl, Inc.

Discover how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing manufacturing. Join industry experts for a dynamic panel discussion on real-world AI applications, implementation challenges, choosing the right solutions, ethical considerations, and future trends. Get actionable insights to put AI to work in your operations today. Don't miss this opportunity to drive transformative results for your business.

Eric Danziger

CEO & Co-Founder
Invisible AI

Melonee Wise

Chief Technology Officer
Agility Robotics

Paul Thomas

Director Machine Vision and Applied AI
P&G

Rajat Gupta

Sr. Director, Business Development - AI & Emerging Technologies
Microsoft

The vast majority of manufacturers today are coping with shortage of a machine operators. Despite a recent surge of consumer demand for US-produced goods, manufacturers are falling behind due to a workforce deficit of more than 800,000 open positions. 60% of manufacturers are unable to take new business opportunities due to inadequate staffing levels.

Robots seem the answer, but 98% of manufacturers still don’t have a single robot arm in production.  In this session, we will deep dive into the reasons for this gap and answer the question: "Is AI the silver bullet for higher robot adoption?"

Juan Luis Aparicio

CEO and Co-founder
Stealth Startup

Artificial intelligence makes control logic more agile and manufacturing processes more flexible and precise. During this session, we will show you how AI can simplify challenging applications where there is high variance, small batch runs, or frequent changes due to short product life cycles. Using AI in combination with computer vision, industrial automation, and standard robotics, machines no longer require special programming to perform specific tasks, as they can now learn from their own experiences.

Steffen Klawitter

Digital Enterprise Lead Architect
Siemens Digital Industries

The era of simulation in robotics is only just beginning. This session will explore the many roles played by simulation in the deployment of production systems today as well as some exciting directions for the near future.

Buck Babich

Senior Robotics R&D Manager
NVIDIA

Damion Shelton

CEO and Co-Founder
Agility Robotics

In this talk, we will delve into the critical need for enhancing and fine-tuning human-robot interactions, particularly in light of emerging technologies such as Large Language Models and advanced Conversational AI. As robots are becoming increasingly sophisticated and our interactions with them more natural and dialogue-driven, the quality and nature of these interactions gain paramount importance. The discussion will underscore the challenges and nuances of transitioning from explicit, hard-coded programs to nuanced language-based instructions for robots. A central theme will be the human-robot-interaction mechanisms necessary for such a transition and the importance of building these mechanisms on reliable data, resulting in desired behaviors. We are at the beginning of a rapid expansion in the capability of robots, through simulated training and LLM-based behavior generation, and this means it is doubly important to understand how we will interact with these newly empowered devices.

Kel Guerin

Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer
READY Robotics

Arye Barnehama

CEO
Elementary

Ed Goffin

Vice President, Product Marketing
Pleora Technologies

Rajesh Iyengar

Co-Founder and CEO
Lincode Labs Inc.

AI and Machine Learning (ML) are accelerating gains in advanced manufacturing, enabling levels of productivity accessible to the diverse eco-system of large to small-sized manufacturers.  Combined with advanced robotics, “point of need” manufacturing has the potential to transform the entire logistics supply chain, reduce the size of vast inventories, and prioritize transportation and skilled field technicians for critical items that cannot be manufactured in the field.  In recent years severe shortages of critical components occurred due to Covid19, offshore semiconductor production constraints, and shipping blockages.  These blockages starved manufacturing process flows downstream and blocked upstream logistics with overflowing inventories.  Advanced robotic manufacturing will provide capabilities for on-site production, repair, and refurbishment of parts and consumables while inspecting for defects to capture potential failures before they occur. 

Larry Sweet

Director, Engineering
ARM Institute

As automation and digitization of manufacturing processes continues to expand rapidly for the foreseeable future, many tasks will remain manual or only semi-automated (including human-in-the-loop operations) due to the scale of economics for complex tasks and the cost of robotic platform and total integration costs.

Using recent advantages in applied artificial intelligence, this work demonstrates a real-world framework that allows a complete station contextual understanding using object detection, object classification, scene understating and temporal and spatial context of actions. Results from successful deployments will be included, where a station process is fully decomposed, analytics extracted, and optimization markers are learned and highlighted.

Itay Cnaan-On

Head of AI
Industrial Next

Generative AI Foundation models and their deployments have opened up a plethora of opportunities for enterprises to automate processes as well as customer and employee interaction. This session focuses on how multi-modal (text, images, video, 3D, etc.) AI Foundation models could unlock new Industrial Automation scenarios. 

Rajat Gupta

Sr. Director, Business Development - AI & Emerging Technologies
Microsoft

We will explore the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) in critical sectors of the manufacturing and production environment as ways to empower the frontline worker and the CEO through a tangible, rich data experience.

Ted Rozier

Director of Digital, Advanced Technology and Robotics
Festo

Autonomous driving and AutoGPT have captured our imagination about automated AI systems that make real-time decisions. While intelligent automation has been around for a long time, modern artificial intelligence promises more human-like decision-making as well as success in more diverse situations. Intelligent autonomous agents digitize high-value skills that can be used to train and upskill operators, analysts, and engineers. They can operate machines and processes autonomously and continue learning on the job.

Kence Anderson

CEO & Co-Founder
Composabl, Inc.

New technologies — such as AI, sensors, and wireless – promise to transform industries from ‘programmed automation’ to ‘AI-powered autonomy’. Modern robots have already found significant use in the fields of manufacturing, warehousing, and supply-chain logistics. Robotics is rapidly expanding into new domains of automation like healthcare, hospitality, agriculture, and many more. 

In this session, we will discuss a broader set of factors – many technological, some non-technical – that need to be considered for full realization of sustainable & profitable AI-powered automation ecosystems. 

Atul Hatalkar

Sr. Principal Engineer
Intel Corporation

Howie Choset

Professor of Robotics
Carnegie Mellon University