Sept 11 - Visual AI in Manufacturing and Robotics (Day 2)

Join us for day two in a series of virtual events to hear talks from experts on the latest developments at the intersection of Visual AI, Manufacturing and Robotics.

Date and Time

Sept 11 at 9 AM Pacific

Location

Virtual. Register for the Zoom!

Bringing Specialist Agents to the Physical World to Improve Manufacturing Output

U.S. manufacturing productivity (output per labor hour) has been stagnant since 2008, driven by a stall in technology integration as well as available workers. RIOS Agents are collaborative AI perception and control systems that act as plant managers' eyes on the ground. Our Agents become specialists in a process, observing process steps, reporting on them, and ultimately controlling them by integrating into new or existing equipment. This enables factory production to be optimized in a way that was previously not possible.

About the Speaker

Clinton Smith is the co-founder and CEO of RIOS, whose AI agents watch, optimize and control production in various industrial facilities, including deep penetration into wood products and lumber. Clinton previously was a Senior Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC, leading multiple Dept. of Energy & Dept. of Defense projects, and holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University and a BS in Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech.

Accelerating Robotics with Simulation

In this session, Steve Xie, CEO of Lightwheel, shares how simulation-first workflows and high-quality SimReady assets are transforming the development of visual AI in manufacturing. From warehouse anomaly detection to worker safety and object identification, Steve will explore how physics-accurate simulation and synthetic datasets can drive scalable AI training with minimal real-world data. Drawing from Lightwheel’s deployment of robot models like GR00T N1 in factory environments, the talk highlights how unifying vision, language, and action in simulation accelerates real-world deployment while improving safety, generalization, and efficiency.

About the Speaker

Dr. Steve Xie is founder and CEO of Lightwheel, a company leading simulation infrastructure for embodied AI. Steve is a pioneer in generative-AI-powered simulation for robotics. He holds a B.S. from Peking University and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Steve has led simulation efforts at NVIDIA and Cruise, where he built end-to-end synthetic data pipelines that set industry benchmarks for realism, scalability, and sim2real transfer.

Anomalib 2.0: Edge Inference and Model Deployment

When deploying models for inference, just exporting the models and calling them via the inferencers do not work. There are challenges related to pre-processing and post-processing. Any deviation in these steps during inference impacts performance. This talk is about how we re-designed components of Anomalib to integrate pre and post-processing steps in the model graph.

About the Speaker

Samet Akcay is an AI Research Engineer at Intel who leads ML research and development efforts across multiple Open Edge Platform libraries, including Intel Geti, Datumaro, Anomalib, Training Extensions, and Vision Inference libraries. His research specializes in semi/self-supervised learning, zero/few-shot learning, and multi-modal object and anomaly detection. He is the creator of Anomalib, a major open-source anomaly detection library.

Exploring Robotic Manipulation Datasets using FiftyOne: DROID and Amazon Armbench

About the Speaker

Allen Lee is currently a Machine Learning Engineer at Voxel51. Before that, Allen was the Co-Founder and Consulting Engineer at Leap Scientific LLC, where they provided scientific software consultancy services related to computation, machine learning, and computer vision.