Landing.ai: Andrew Ng’s next flight to bring Artificial Intelligence to factory floors

With this in mind, he has announced Landing. ai,  a new AI and ML powered startup, and its first stop is manufacturing.

As per Andrew, the IT industry has seen firsthand benefits of modern AI. However, he wants to build an AI-powered society. In his own words, “One in which our physical needs, health care, transportation, food, and lodging are more accessible through AI, and where every person is freed from repetitive mental drudgery.”

Landing.AI aims to help organizations and enterprises with in-house AI solutions, and employee training to successfully transition the organizational structure and develop strategies and technologies for enterprises to transform in the age of AI.

They will initially focus on the manufacturing industry. Foxconn, a multinational electronics contract manufacturing company is Landing.ai’s first strategic partner and is working with the startup since July this year. They provide Landing.ai a platform to jointly develop and deploy AI solutions and training globally.

Here are some of the focus areas within manufacturing where Landing.ai will work on:

• It will bring in an AI-powered adaptive manufacturing, automated quality control, and predictive maintenance.
• Their AI-powered solutions will revolve around visual inspection, controlling and automating, calibration and tuning, and automated issue identification for large manufacturer partners.
• They are developing solutions for retraining of current or displaced workers to make them AI ready.
• AI would be used to improve quality control, shorten design cycles, remove supply-chain bottlenecks, reduce materials and energy waste, and improve production yields.
• They are also dedicating resources to improve the organizational structure and help companies in adopting the most effective AI technologies and processes.

At a press briefing in San Francisco, Andrew demonstrated an example of using AI for visual inspection in a factory’s quality control efforts. Using a circuit board embedded beneath a digital camera, a computer was used to identify defective parts over an assembly line, instead of a worker doing that. Moreover, Landing.ai has developed a learning algorithm that takes only five training images for the computer to be trained, as compared to thousands of images required by other computer vision systems.

Looking toward the future, Andrew said that Landing.ai could move into other sectors such as logistics, apart from manufacturing. He would also work on providing more public education resources to help a broader population adopt these new technologies.

For more information and updates, you can visit their website landing.ai.