A group of 11 of us met to “talk quality” in an informal atmosphere over beer and wine on Thursday, September 11, at Frontier RTP – Building 800. Frontier’s Thursday OOO event provided drinks.

We had exciting news to share: one of our first-time attendees in July secured new employment through a connection he made with us!

There was no pre-scheduled topic for discussion, but one of our members asked how those attending thought AI would be used in Quality. It was pointed out that there are different types of AI such as:

• Generative AI: Capable of creating new content such as text, images, music, or code
• Machine Learning: Allows systems to learn from data and improve without explicit programming
• Deep Learning: Uses artificial neural networks to learn complex patterns from large datasets.
• Natural Language Processing: Understands, interprets, and generates human language
• Computer Vision: Interprets visual information from images and videos
• Exper Systems: Emulates decision-making

We expect our companies to experiment with and utilize all of these capabilities. We wonder about supervision and control, though. For example, suppose a vision system is continually updating its defect detection capability. How can we ensure process control and prevent unintended changes that might allow more or different types of defects to slip through or introduce new false failures?

Tim Whetten