Machine Learning is the New Jake

Everyone in, and serving, manufacturing businesses has encountered terms such as Industry 4.0, Digital Transformation, and Smart Factory. Small compute footprints, low-cost, high-availability communication systems, high-capacity–low-cost memory, rapidly evolving sensor technology, and new time-series data structures supporting real-time analytics are all conspiring to empower industrial operators to transform their businesses from "tribal knowledge systems" to data-driven operations. Twenty years ago -- in the dawn of the Internet age, at a converting operation then part of International Paper, we relied on Jake. Jake was a medium age, good natured man who had worked the plant for seventeen years -- since high school. Jake, unusual in that he was able to stand the middle ground between Union and Management, epitomized "tribal knowledge."