Innovation
A sound that’s slightly off before a bearing fails. A smell that shows up before a chemical reaction runs hot. A texture that feels wrong before any instrument confirms it. Frontline workers pick up on signals like these constantly and, most of the time, nothing in the plant is built to capture…
When President Donald Trump announced a wave of tariffs in early 2025, he launched a war of words. Threats and counterthreats flew across the Atlantic and Pacific in a swirl of escalation, retaliation, and reprieve. Economists were hard-pressed to get a clear picture of what was happening beyond…
There’s a number that stopped me in my tracks recently. U.S. manufacturers spent about $32 billion training and upskilling their people—a 22% jump from 2019—and the average worker now logs close to five more training hours a year than they did back then, climbing from 42.9 hours to 47.6 (…
Engineers often use vision-language models to produce new designs, such as for airplane or automobile components. To simulate how those components will perform in realistic situations, they’ll use tried-and-true computer-aided design (CAD) software to generate 3D models of those designs that…
Quality inspection has always depended on people who know what they are looking at. That remains true as automated visual inspection becomes faster and more widely deployed. The strongest systems don’t try to remove expert judgment completely. They capture it, structure it, and apply it…
From our bank accounts to smartphones, all our sensitive data and devices are protected with a technology known as cryptography. Present-day cryptography essentially uses a very challenging set of math problems that are nearly impossible for current computers to solve. These math problems act as…