Innovation
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…
3D printing has matured from a speculative sci-fi fantasy into a practical tool. Plastic is the most commonly used material for 3D printing, but research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is helping expand 3D printing into a new area—ceramics. Small details matter when…
The vision system scanned the part and logged a pass. The SPC chart stayed inside its control limits. The line kept moving.
Three weeks later, the customer complaint arrived. The defect had been there the whole time, sitting just inside the algorithm’s confidence threshold, close…
The premise of AI large language models (LLMs) is that any problem can be solved by vacuuming up as much information as possible, running it through probability models, and performing complex calculations to make predictions and come up with the optimal solution.
Another premise…
The deployment of automated software systems called AI agents has recently exploded. A November 2025 report by MIT Sloan School of Management and Boston Consulting Group found that 35% of surveyed businesses had already deployed AI agents, while another 44% planned to implement agentic AI soon…