Leaders from across cutting-edge manufacturing and design industries share their visions of converging technology, software, and the factory of the future in keynote addresses at the 20th Congress on the Future of Engineering Software (COFES) in Menlo Park, CA, April 7–9.
This year’s theme looks at the technologies and the engineering software needed to implement next-generation product designs. Convened in Silicon Valley for the first time, a VIP Special registration package is available for the event.
In her keynote address, Elizabeth Baron, the Founder and Principal of Immersionary Enterprises, LLC, explores how industry is using immersive realities (like those seen in consumer VR headsets) to distribute and share product concepts, simultaneously, in real-time. This convergence of physical and virtual worlds, Baron observes, leads to a better understanding of the multi-function, collaborative engineering process.
As a result of such continuous, converging innovation, engineers have to adopt sophisticated new tools to conceptualize, design, validate, develop, make, and support a matrix of complex technologies. Included here are techniques such as Additive Manufacturing, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality, Generative Design, IoT, Machine Learning, and the Cloud.
Jay Vleeschhouwe, a senior research analyst at Griffin Securities, puts it all into perspective and reviews the performance of the technical software companies and industry in his keynote: “A Brief View from Wall Street.” Also eyeing the market for opportunity are venture capitalists, including keynoter Eric Anderson, Principal in Scale Venture Partners, who will talk about the burst of startup activity in the engineering software sector.
Offering insight into the industry’s current state of disruption is Hans Hartman, market research analyst for the photo and video industry, and president of Suite 48 Analytics. He’ll offer lessons learned as the industry has morphed from selling film-based to digital to a smartphone to AI-based computational photos and videos — and anything in between.
The factory of the future, or Industry 4.0, brings together robotics, internet of things (IoT), 5G, artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR). In his keynote at COFES, Paul Maher, general manager, industry experiences, cloud + AI at Microsoft will outline his perspective of what the manufacturer of the future might look like and presents scenarios that embody Microsoft’s vision of the manufacturing industry.
Facebook’s Jeff Allen, Director of Operations Engineering, will take listeners behind the scenes to Facebook’s designed-and-built integrated environment for manufacturing, testing, predictive analytics, hardware reliability, and product data management. He’ll discuss the challenges and benefits of such a system when used to transition from product development to production to delivery to data centers.
Another area being explored at COFES is the explosion in engineering software processing power both on the desktop and mobile. Mark Rehmann, senior marketing manager at Dell will host a roundtable discussion to debate the impact this could have on areas like certification, as well as how dependent we should be on machine learning and cognitive computing elements.
Learn more about the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software (COFES) and the VIP Special registration package.
