Industrial Internet Consortium Creates Vision on AI for Industrial IoT

The Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC), which works to accelerate the adoption of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), has announced it is leading the vision for industrial artificial intelligence (AI) with new bodies of work and will be sharing insights at the IoT Solutions World Congress (IOTSWC).

Building on the successful Industrial IoT Analytics Framework Technical Report (IIAF), which offered industrial analytics guidance in evolving fields such as big data, AI and machine learning, IIC is expanding its program of work to focus on AI in industrial IoT applications. The Industrial Analytics Task Group has been expanded and renamed to Industrial AI Task Group.

“No single technology has the potential to change how we do business in virtually every sector of the economy more than artificial intelligence,” said Wael William Diab, Industrial Artificial Intelligence Task Group Chair, Secretary of the IIC Steering Committee, IOTSWC 2018 AI Forum Chair and Senior Director for Huawei. “To achieve transformative business outcomes, IT and OT stakeholders will have to work closely together on the integration of AI into industrial applications.”

The Industrial AI Task Group recently hosted a workshop at the IIC quarterly meeting in Helsinki this past May to promote IIC’s vision of AI. In a panel session moderated by Diab, four IIC experts talked about the importance of AI in industrial applications. The panel was well received and attended by over 100 IIC members at the IIC quarterly meeting in Helsinki. Here are some of panelists’ remarks:

“AI is still in its infancy but with great potential in industrial applications,” said Shi-Wan Lin, Co-Chair of the IIC Technology Working Group and CEO & Co-Founder of Thingswise. “There’s still lots of work to be done but applying AI in the vast amount of industrial data will enable IIoT systems to create higher value in the years to come.”

“While AI toolsets will help solve customer’s problems, you also need good, clean consistent data and analytics to put it into action,” said Christopher Ganz, IIC Steering Committee Member and Group Vice President for Service Research & Development at ABB.

“Custom silicon is very important for AI,” said Liang Guang, IIC Member and Senior Standards Manager at Huawei Technologies. “While some of the big vendors have used custom hardware designs, heterogeneous accelerators can offer the performance needed for AI on the cloud.”

“There are many industries advancing AI,” said Christoph Fritsch, IIC Member and Senior Director of Industrial, Scientific and Medical Markets at Xilinx. “We’ll continue to see the number of applications that use AI grow in a wide variety of industries in the next few years.”

This October, IOTSWC will launch its inaugural AI & Cognitive Systems Forum. The forum will explore the various aspects of AI from a foundational technology perspective to transformational use cases that open up endless business possibilities in IIoT. In addition, it will showcase how AI-enabled IIoT solutions can provide enhanced insights, complex decision making, self-learning and self-healing in industrial environments.

A workshop, called Deciphering AI, will precede the forum serving as an “AI 101” with the goal of providing both background to the attendees on AI as well as the key concerns and challenges with deploying AI. The IOTSWC AI & Cognitive Systems Forum as well as the Deciphering AI Workshop will be chaired by Diab and IIC Member Edy Liongosari, Chief Research Scientist at Accenture Labs, with contributions from and sessions led by several IIC members. Diab and Liongosari are also members of the IOTSWC Program Committee.

For more information, visit the Industrial Internet Consortium.