Artificial Intelligence to increase productivity, efficiency

Artificial Intelligence (AI) cannot replace human beings but is in the business of supporting people to live better by increasing productivity and efficiency, an official of Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company, told Gulf Times.

“In many places, we will need more humans. We see many humans involved in communicating with teams, and in several other areas more humans will be needed. Human will do more work at what they are good at and the automation will replace some functions. AI will however, help in increasing productivity and efficiency,” explained Dragos Margineantu, senior Machine Learning scientist, Boeing Research and Technology.Speaking on the sidelines of MLDAS 2018 Symposium, jointly organised by Qatar Computing Research Institute and Boeing, he said that Boeing research into pilotless airplanes is progressing. Ramsis Adam, director of Analytics and Simulation Technology, Boeing and Seema Chopra, Boeing Research and Technology, India, also highlighted the increasing role of AI and Machine Learning.“Boeing research into pilotless airplanes is in progress and the main question is safety. One of our goals is to increase the safety record. We are working on it by executing some functions in an autonomous way. The research efforts are going on,” noted Margineantu. “Humans are essential to support us. AI is not to offer human level intelligence but to offer support in different areas such as functions. AI is in the business of supporting people to live better,” continued Margineantu.The Boeing official maintained that AI is being increasingly used in every application that is of low risk. “But it will be slow in applications of higher risk such as autonomous cars and airplanes. AI will probably move slowly in areas where human lives are involved,” he highlighted. According to Adam, AI helps in increasing the efficiency and productivity. “Boeing is a leader in aerospace and leading the research in the area. One of our goals is to increase safety. We have a backlog of over 5,000 airplanes and we make use of AI to increase the productivity. AI helps in advancing the efficiency of meeting our goals,” explained Adam.“We are so proud of our products. Qatar Airways is the launch customer for our future 777X and they were one of the first customers for the 787. We want to quickly deliver the products for our customers and one of the benefits of AI is that it will increase our efficiency,” continued the official. “The power of AI will optimise the functions of mobility and transportation. AI is leveraging the data that is collected. By making use of AI, we have the ability to collect data and create algorithms that leverage the data to give insights to make decision in our process. AI gives our engineers, decision makers and others tools to make better ways of process,” highlighted Adam.Chopra stressed that Machine Learning is the computer algorithm that use and produce rules and models out of data. “Human Centric Machine Learning will allow user to understand what is happening.We can now produce models that are completely not understandable by humans which create really accurate predictions. Occasionally they make errors but we may not understand very well where they make errors. In Machine Learning, we use data from all areas of generation,” added Chopra.