Page 35 - Kaleidoscope Academic Conference Proceedings 2020

INDUSTRIAL TRANSFORMATION AND THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION: A FOCUS ON
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, DATA SCIENCE AND DATA ENGINEERING

Adam T. Drobot
Chairman, OpenTechWorks, Inc. and Past Chairman of the IEEE IoT Initiative, USA

enterprises discovered the value in using computers and
ABSTRACT
storing data in digital form – they have not stopped since then!
The book written by Paul Strassman [1] captures the essence
Deep digitization drives value because it enables the of why this was important and a prescient vision of the
exploitation of computational techniques to solve hard benefits. The computers of that age were large centralized
problems inherent to industrial enterprises. This includes machines that only a few organizations could afford, and
product design, processes and procedures used in industrial data storage was at best cumbersome and based on either tape
settings tools and methods for manufacturing, and product drives or large disc drives with limited capacity, yet they
maintenance, repair and overhaul. This paper will cover delivered a significant edge to early adopters. By the 1970s
what is meant by deep digitization, review the thinking that we saw the proliferation of “super computers”, large main
has brought us to where we are today and look at the frames that despite limited memories and infinitesimal
challenges and options that lay ahead. It will also describe speeds compared to today, were powerful enough to make a
what is meant by industrial transformation and identify profound impact. Early examples of applications included:
the stakeholders and markets involved. engineering design and commercial operations, management
and administration in the public sector, advances in the
The successful adoption of digitization is complex, multi- research and development community, and on content in the
disciplinary, requires systems thinking, and the mastery of a entertainment industry. In engineering it was the entry of
large number of technologies and disciplines. Success is also CAD/CAM tools and the use of finite element analysis in
highly dependent on access to powerful tools, as well as mechanical design, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in
management, organizational, and collaborative structures. aerospace and defense, and circuit analysis for electronics. In
Part of this paper will be focused on technology areas that commercial operations it was electronic switching
stand out and pose challenges deserving special attention: automation in telecommunications and uses in corporate and
computational analytics (CA), consisting of optimization government processes focused on business functions, that
methods, modeling, and simulation; artificial intelligence eventually emerged as information and communications
including machine learning; and lastly, data science and technology (ICT).
data engineering. Standards and common practices are also
crucial and no more so than in the collection and The advances led to significantly shorter product cycles and
dissemination of data within an enterprise and how that data significantly better design for manufacturing tools, building
is shared within a larger ecosystem. This paper will structures, aircraft, white goods and both industrial and
additionally describe past attempts at solving this problem consumer electronics. In R&D organizations, a significant
and examine possible avenues for creating long-lived data outcome was the wide-scale adoption of modeling and
protocols and building blocks for managing and extracting simulation for insights into phenomena too difficult and
utility from the vast pools of data that can be found in complex to attack with analytics or to deduce from
industrial enterprises and the ecosystems they operate in. experimental data. The entertainment industry discovered
computer graphics for special effects, the transcoding of
Keywords – Artificial intelligence, best practices, data movies and videos for viewing on any screen, the rendering
engineering, data science, digital transformation, of animation, and early computer games. Just as important
digitization, open source, standards was the introduction of remote terminals with modems that
allowed engineers, IT personnel, and other end users, to log
1. INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW on to computer systems remotely changing the pattern of
how we work and structure our organizations, even though it
I would like to start with a foreshortened tale of how we got was only at 110-300 baud.
to where we are today, and why we are talking about deep
digitization and industrial transformation. The tale is not Eugene Brooks gave a talk at Supercomputing 1990 titled
built around technology itself but around the patterns of “The Attack of the Killer Micros” that recognized the era
adaption by significant sectors of the world economy. where PC’s and engineering workstations would dominate
Sometime in the late 1950s and early 1960s commercial

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