Artificial intelligence (AI) has moved out of the realm of scary sci-fi movies and into our homes and offices.
It has implications for every industry, and smart organizations are realizing that AI will soon need to be an integral part of their business if they are going to remain competitive in the years ahead.
Ryan VanAlstine, co-founder and chief technology officer of digital development company BlueChasm, a subsidiary of Mark III Systems, believes that AI is the way of the future for all businesses.
“Every organization needs to be able to see and hear what they’re doing, whether that involves monitoring a patient’s vital signs or inspecting products as they come off an assembly line,” he says. “But it’s not always practical or economically viable for a human being to do that.”
That’s where augmented intelligence – using AI technology to assist human employees and increase their productivity rather than replacing them with machines – comes into the picture.
Mark III Systems is an IT solutions provider that works closely with a large variety of enterprise clients to integrate AI into their businesses. Manufacturing is one of the industries that stands to gain the most from artificial intelligence, but sometimes it’s hard for these business owners to understand how their business will benefit from AI.
To help manufacturing companies understand the value of AI, Lenovo and Mark III worked together to create a quality control demo that simulates AI in a manufacturing environment.
The demo – on display at the Lenovo AI Innovation Center in Morrisville, North Carolina – allows manufacturers to see first-hand how artificial intelligence can improve product quality and efficiency on the production line. In the demonstration, a Lenovo Tiny desktop is attached to a camera that ‘watches’ cans coming off an actual conveyor belt to make sure the cans are free of blemishes.
VanAlstine explains how they did it: “We had to train the AI model so it knows what the can is supposed to look like from every angle. We compiled hundreds of images, uploaded them onto our Lenovo ThinkSystem SD530 server and used several open source frameworks to train the model so that it recognizes what a valid can looks like.
“When we first started building our Vision AI model, it took over 10 hours. Leveraging the high computing power of the Lenovo server, we were doing it in under nine minutes.”
Experiencing the demo helps many customers understand the value of AI, but they may not know how to implement it into their own business. That’s where Lenovo’s team of AI experts can also help.
At Lenovo’s AI Innovation Centers in Morrisville, North Carolina, Stuttgart, Germany and Beijing, China, customers can work with Lenovo and partner solution architects, data scientists and system engineers to develop their first use case using Lenovo clusters and even test drive Lenovo intelligent Computing Orchestrator (LiCO), Lenovo’s AI training platform.
Andy Lin, vice-president: strategy at Mark III Systems, believes their partnership with Lenovo benefits both his company and his customers.
“Our partnership with Lenovo has given us access to state-of-the-art tools and resources that we wouldn’t otherwise have had. On top of that, we benefit from the advice, guidance and expertise of the Lenovo AI team. As more and more organizations become interested in implementing AI, we have everything we need to make that a reality.”