Artificial Intelligence — the driving force of Industry 4.0

Published in

Becoming Human: Artificial Intelligence Magazine

5 min readApr 27, 2021

The International Society of Automation estimates that almost every plant loses at least 5% of production due to downtime. Many may lose as much as 20%. The cost to the global processing industry alone is estimated at USD $20 billion.

The average cost of unplanned downtime is USD $220,000 a day for a paper or pulp plant (International Journal of Strategic Engineering Asset Management).

Industries face the growing cost of manual inspections & limited access to qualified personnel. Poor quality of products and processes inspections affects customer satisfaction, reputation, etc. Poor counting of products means losses (freebies) on one hand (we give too many) or disappointed customers on the other hand (we sent too little). Slow processes create missed opportunities and slow down go-to-market activities.

AI helping avoid losses across industries

All industries generate data and a growing number collects them. But data without analytics is useless — it’s not gold, it’s just cost (of storage). Therefore lack of historic data analytics means: we don’t know what we don’t know. Data Analytics helps us understand things like Why something happens? What will likely happen? What are the trends?

Then there is another aspect of Data Analytics called: automation. Automation helps us become efficient at i.e. IoT sensors data analytics, document processing etc.

A typical question we ask ourselves when starting with Data Analytics is: can we leverage historic data to make better decisions? And the answer is yes, it is possible and leveraging Artificial Intelligence is one of the ways to accomplish that.

To address all of these problems, we have made a strategic decision at byteLAKE to work with various industry leaders and talented researchers in efforts to combine human knowledge, industry expertise, and know-how with the best AI algorithms and technologies. The result is a product called: Cognitive Services.

byteLAKE’s Cognitive Services: Artificial Intelligence for Industry 4.0

byteLAKE’s Cognitive Services is a collection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models designed to address Industry 4.0 needs. Each AI model has been designed and trained to be razor-focused on specific industrial jobs, therefore ensuring maximum accuracy.

In essence, byteLAKE’s Cognitive Services focus primarily on the following two areas:

AI-assisted visual inspection for efficient quality of products & process monitoring.
AI-powered Big Data / IoT sensors data analytics to find trends, enable predictive maintenance, answer questions like why something happens, what will likely happen and to find the collective meaning of the data extracted from many sources.

There are a couple of special versions of Cognitive Services:

Wet Line Detector for Paper Mills: automates detection and measurements of the so-called wet line which occurs during paper production. This module helps reduce costs, expedite visual inspection and avoid unplanned downtime in paper mills. Available as a complete end-to-end solution, including edge components (hardware computing units, cameras), software license, integration services or guidelines, and post-deployment customer care. Read more: https://www.bytelake.com/en/ai-for-paper-industry/
AI for Restaurants: intelligent cameras that recognize food types and automate the billing process.

End-to-end offering for industries, byteLAKE as one-stop-shop

byteLAKE’s Cognitive Services have been designed to work with the majority of the available hardware components incl. cameras and hardware computing units (i.e. desktop PCs). However, it is also available as a complete, end-to-end solution, ready for integration with manufacturing software components. Typical deployment is shown in the picture below.