DAMI workshop presented state of the art technology for digitalization

- The technical purpose of the workshop was to exchange information and ideas about recent developments in the area of digitalization for complex manufacturing, says Andreas Kassler, professor in computer science at Karlstad University. What does make a digital company, what digitalization competence and methods you need for digitalizing products and production processes, what are concrete use cases, what are challenges and what are key barriers that need to be addressed for deployment of advanced technologies such as machine learning and big data analytics inside complex manufacturing scenarios – these were the main topics for the workshop. The purpose was met and we will surely have more of these workshops.

Which parts got the most attention?

- The keynote speakers were very inspiring and showed also concrete use cases in the area of AI, machine learning and edge computing that companies actually deploy in their production processes. Many participants were interested in the work that DAMI aims to do in the near future and we got a lot of excellent networking contacts. We had around 90 participants and many came from local companies. This shows that there are significant needs for knowledge dissemination between academia and industry and that we can learn from each other.

Anything extra notable from the workshop?

- Yes, I found the idea of applying digitalisation-related processes and value chains from companies that are already using AI successfully in their daily operations very interesting. For example, dishwashers and air conditioners can be connected to the cloud and share information on their operation, which enables to train better control processes that are then deployed in software in those machines. By doing so, the value that machines provide will be increased over time based on update of their software.

The workshop ended with a panel discussion - what questions were raised?

- How do we enable effective knowledge transfer between academia, SME:s and startups and  what methods we can use for this? Also, we discussed what the showstoppers might be.

What's in the near term for DAMI?

- We are building up work within the competence groups. Contributions from companies in relation to problems to look into or technical questions to tackle are highly welcomed.