How artificial intelligence could lead to self-healing airplanes

A new partnership between aviation giant Boeing and Carnegie Mellon University hints at the power of fields such as artificial intelligence and big data to transform huge, multi-billion-dollar industries. As part of a three-year, $7.5 million deal that will establish a new Aerospace Data Analytics Lab, Boeing and the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science will work on a range of new projects that will apply the principles of AI and big data to improving the quality of Boeing's aerospace activities. The goal of the new partnership, first and foremost is to make sense of the burgeoning amount of data in the aerospace industry. By applying principles of machine learning, it might be possible to optimize many aspects of Boeing's operations -- including those related to design, construction and operation – and turn ordinary data into real-world insights. According to Jaime Carbonell, the Carnegie Mellon professor and Director of the Language Technologies Institute, who will head up the new Aerospace Data Analytics Lab, "The mass of data generated daily by the aerospace industry overwhelms human understanding, but recent advances in language technologies and machine learning give us every reason to expect that we can gain useful insights from that data."