AINI

Meetup # 4

The fourth AINI meet-up was carried out as a collaboration with Digital Catapult. Peter Bloomfield from Digital catapult joined us on the night to give an overview of their Machine Intelligence Garage which offers companies support and training to progress their AI ideas and products. The focus of tonights event was the use of AI in manufacturing and we had some excellent speakers.

Our first speaker was Ficare O’Donnell from Encirc360. Fiacre joined Quinn Glass in 1998 as production planning manager. Throughout his time at Quinn Glass, rebranded as Encirc in 2014, he has held a number of roles including business development manager and marketing manager. In 2015 was appointed to a new role of strategic development and earlier this year was appointed to the Encirc executive.

Encirc is a market leader in glass container design, manufacture, bottling and logistics solutions for the UK, Irish and Italian food and beverages industries. With over 1,450 employees, it operates from its purpose-built sites in Derrylin, Co Fermanagh, Elton, Cheshire, and Milan Italy, producing more than 3 billion glass bottles and jars annually, and can fill up to 250 million litres of bulk shipped beverages every year.

Fiacre gave an excellent talk about the challenges they face in manufacturing and how they believe that AI can help them an issued a call to the audience to come forward if they had any ideas!

Fiacre O’Donnell

Strategic development director, Encirc360

Our next speaker was Dr Glen Hawe from Ulster University.
Glen’s PhD was in Bayesian optimisation (10 years ago, before it was called Bayesian optimisation). In his PhD he implemented an optimizer in commercial CAD software used by manufacturers who need to optimize electromagnetic effects, e.g. supercoductor manufacturers, electron gun designers, MRI magnets, etc.” Glen gave a great overview of his foundational work and outlined the work his reasearch team are doing now. 

 

Dr Glen Have

Lecturer Ulster University

Our final talk of the night was from the excellent Axial3D who discussed the impact of machine learning on manufacturing of 3D printed anatomy. They have been providing this service for over two years to the healthcare sector. The talk examined at the subject from the software development and manufacturing point of view as well as touching on the economic impact of ML on the companies growth and development. The talk was delivered by two of the companies senior management team, Cathy and Niall. 

Cathy Coomber: Cathy has responsibility for engineering operations within the company, including print productivity, logistics and quality/regulatory compliance.

Niall Haslam: Niall leads axial3D’s software and R&D teams, central to delivering on axial3D’s ambitious software plans in the coming months and years. Niall has over 10 years software development experience in both the commercial and academic sectors.

Cathy and Niall

Axial3D

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