DfAI: The missing piece of artificial intelligence engineering

Considering how quickly engineering design and manufacturing have advanced alongside computational developments, it may surprise you that very few engineers are trained in both engineering system design and artificial intelligence. There are countless opportunities for breakthrough improvements in how we develop new technology using AI in engineering design, but to succeed in these challenging areas, engineers must understand a new speciality--Design for Artificial Intelligence. Chris McComb, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon, and his student Glen Williams, now Principal Scientist at Re:Build Manufacturing, have developed a Design for Artificial Intelligence (DfAI) framework in collaboration with researchers at Penn State University to educate and encourage the academic and industrial engineering community to adopt AI engineering design. "Most of the time, we view AI as a tool to add onto an existing system, but to develop better systems we need to integrate AI into the engineering design process from the very beginning," McComb explains. A core challenge is motivating institutions to make investments in the long-term potential of AI technologies.