While not a magic bullet, artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the game for manufacturers faced with ongoing labor shortages, decreased productivity and quality control, and an unpredictable supply chain exacerbated by growing consumer demands. Increasingly sophisticated AI is already being used in nearly every industry--from automotive and food & beverage to metal fabrication and plastic molding--to power predictive systems, increase robot capabilities, improve the precision of machine vision and help businesses optimize their processes to improve quality and reduce waste. The future is here--and we're just getting started. As AI becomes more powerful, robots and other machines can quickly learn what they need to do to perform given tasks without expensive and difficult-to-find AI experts. When coupled with decreasing hardware costs and clearer use cases demonstrating the benefits, deploying AI is an obvious choice for small and large companies alike.

Since 1958, apetito has been supplying frozen foods and ready-to-eat meals to schools, nurseries, businesses, hospitals, and retirement homes across Europe and Canada. Production of its meal trays involves placement of different food items into trays for shipping and delivery. Complaints from customers about missing food items from trays led the company to seek an automated approach to final product inspection. In its initial attempt to correct this problem, apetito began weighing each tray as it came off the production line. However, this did not adequately address the problem because if one food item on the tray was a little heavier than usual, it could falsely account for what was missing.

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Neurala, the leader in vision AI software, announced that it has raised $12 million in funding to advance the development of vision AI for manufacturing. The round, led by Zebra Ventures and Pelion Venture Partners, with participation from Draper Associates, Friulia, AddValue, 360 Capital Partners, Idinvest Partners, Cougar Capital, and industrial investors IMA and Antares Vision, brings the total invested in Neurala to $26 million. The funding will enable Neurala to evolve and accelerate adoption of its vision AI in the industrial and manufacturing sectors on a global scale, as manufacturers increasingly prioritize automation as part of Industry 4.0 initiatives. Neurala is a pioneer in vision AI for manufacturing. Built on the company's deep AI expertise, Neurala's VIA software delivers an integrated solution designed to help manufacturers improve quality inspection on the production line.

In the summer of 2012, Google made a big media splash when it showed that its researchers "trained a network of 1,000 computers wired up like a brain to recognize cats." While AI, neural networks and its most recent rebranding, "deep learning," were already established fields with decades of research and countless real-world applications behind them, the world at large (and all its cats) took notice. Deep learning, a branch of AI that closely mimics how neurons wire and fire, was becoming more powerful: The massive amounts of digital data and compute power needed for training these systems were now available to companies like Google. Since 2012, applications of AI have expanded to both the consumer and enterprise realms. For instance, AI can be applied to make smart phone pictures more beautiful, delete spam messages, recognize faces, translate languages, make video games more appealing and optimize sales engagements, among many others.

Few areas of industrial technology today remain untouched by artificial intelligence (AI). From controllers to ERP to food safety and robots, AI is changing the technologies we use to run manufacturing and processing facilities in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. One application with a big potential to benefit from AI is quality control software. The use of smart cameras and related AI-enabled software are helping manufacturers achieve improved quality inspection at speeds, latency, and costs beyond the capabilities of human inspectors. And the timing of the arrival of these smart camera technologies is fortuitous, give the social distancing requirements of COVID-19.

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, vision AI software company Neurala announced the launch of its Neurala VIA Authorized Partner program, to help manufacturers leverage the power of vision AI to improve quality inspection and adapt to fluctuating consumer demand. Neurala VIA Authorized Partners are a global network of integrators and distributors with expertise in helping manufacturers adopt automation and implement Industry 4.0 initiatives. Neurala's channel program brings broader adoption and accessibility to Neurala VIA software, an integrated solution to help manufacturers improve quality inspection on the production line while scaling to meet product demands. In a time when flexibility and scalability are more important than ever before, Neurala's partner program will ensure that distributors and systems integrators play a central role in enabling manufacturers to implement vision AI – and to do so quickly – in order to adapt. In cases where deep learning has previously been too costly or time-intensive to implement, this represents a significant paradigm shift and offers strong return on investment.

Enabling an edge-computing architecture with AI is seen as a way forward for advances in strategic applications. And at the advent of 5G network speeds, AI is seen as essential to the endpoints. A new network paradigm based on virtualization enabled by Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), presents an opportunity to push AI processing out to the edge in a distributed architecture, suggests a recent report from Strategy Analytics. Three types of edge computing are foreseen: device as the edge, in which an IoT device generates and consumes data and has embedded AI that can send and receive data to and from additional AI systems; enterprise premise network edge, that can support AI processing on a piece of hardware in a vehicle, drone or machinery, and can collect and process data from smart devices; and operator network edge, with an AI stack/platform to host applications and services, which may be located at a micro data center in a radio tower, edge router, base station or internet gateway. "One of the challenges this new networking paradigm creates stems from the fact that the edge of the network is consistently shifting and moving," stated Caroline Chan, VP and GM, 5G Infrastructure Division, Network Platform Group, Intel, sponsor of the report. In a cloud/client architecture, the link between the centralized cloud and the client has become a bottleneck as more data is processed and network latency increases, causing too much of a time delay.

AI-powered visual inspection pioneer Neurala today announced that its vision AI platform, Brain Builder, has been optimized to enable edge learning for manufacturing and other visual inspection use cases. The latest Brain Builder SDK will debut as a hackathon partner of Bosch ConnectedExperience (BCX), Europe's largest IoT hackathon, in Berlin, Germany from February 17-19. Brain Builder is the only edge learning-enabled AI tool that allows users to build, deploy and analyze custom vision AI solutions with instant feedback on performance and continuous learning in deployment. "Traditional approaches to training deep neural networks (DNN) often fall short in deployment when the network encounters a new situation at the edge that it was not trained to classify," said Massimiliano Versace, CEO and co-founder of Neurala. "This issue is compounded by the fact that oftentimes, DNNs are trained on a server, and then deployed on a smaller, less powerful compute edge that is incapable of learning new information."

In 2020, AI could empower robotics with tools such as this Brain Bulder workspace. For the past decade, robotics has been one of the most interesting areas for developers, industry analysts, and startups to focus on. From emerging technologies and new applications to ongoing challenges, both innovators and entrepreneurs will have a lot to watch in 2020. The Robot Report spoke with the following executives at robotics and artificial intelligence companies about their observations of 2019's trends, as well as their expectations for the new year: Which technologies do you expect to mature the most in 2020, such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), edge computing, 5G wireless networks, or autonomous vehicles? Visti: In 2020, Industry 4.0 will become more of a reality than a vision.

From esoteric tech to AI, visual analysis and deep learning systems are now transforming the innovation of intelligent products and devices, making enterprises more competitive and jobs more efficient. MIT Technology Review Editor at Large, David Rotman, and Max Versace, Cofounder and CEO of Neurala, discuss what this means within the enterprise space and how it translates into worksite and process efficiency. Dr. Massimiliano Versace is the CEO and cofounder of AI-powered visual inspection company, Neurala. Max is a pioneer in non-traditional DNN approaches and a leader in the movement to bring AI beyond the hype and apply it in real-world, tangible use cases. As a cofounder of Neurala, Max has been instrumental in innovating AI technologies that enable customers in the industrial, drone, robotics, and smart device verticals efficiently and cost-effectively deploy AI for real-world impact.