Episode 107: Explainability in AI with Julian Senoner

Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In this episode of the podcast, the topic is "Explainability and AI." Our guest is Julian Senoner, CEO and Co-Founder of EthonAI (https://ethon.ai/). In this conversation, we talk about how to define explainable AI and its major applications, and its future. If you like this show, subscribe at augmentedpodcast.co (https://www.augmentedpodcast.co/). If you like this episode, you might also like Episode 103: Human-First AI with Christopher Nguyen (https://www.augmentedpodcast.co/103). Augmented is a podcast for industry leaders, process engineers, and shop floor operators, hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim (https://trondundheim.com/) and presented by Tulip (https://tulip.co/). Follow the podcast on Twitter (https://twitter.com/AugmentedPod) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/75424477/). Trond's Takeaway: Explainability in AI, meaning knowing exactly what's going on with an algorithm, is very important for industry because its outputs must be understandable to the process engineers using it. The computer has not and will not use the product. Only a domain expert can recognize when the system is wrong, and that will be the case for a very long time in most production environments. Transcript: TROND: Welcome to another episode of the Augmented Podcast. Augmented reveals the stories behind a new era of industrial operations where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. Technology is changing rapidly. What's next in the digital factory, and who's leading the change? In this episode of the podcast, the topic is Explainability and AI. Our guest is Julian Senoner, CEO and Co-Founder of EthonAI. In this conversation, we talk about how to define explainable AI and its major applications, and its future. Augmented is a podcast for industrial leaders, process engineers, and shop floor operators, hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim and presented by Tulip. Julian, welcome to the show. JULIAN: Hello, Trond. Thank you for having me. TROND: I'm excited to have you. You know, you're a fellow runner; that's always good. And you grew up in the ski slopes.; that makes me feel at home as a Norwegian. So you grew up in Austria; that must have been pretty exciting. And then you were something as exciting as a ski instructor in the Alps. That's every man and woman's dream. JULIAN: Yeah, I think it was very nice to grow up in the mountains. I enjoyed it a lot. But, you know, times have passed, and now I'm happy to be in Zurich. TROND: You went on to industrial engineering. You studied manufacturing and production at ETH. And you got interested in statistics and machine learning aspects of all of that. How did this happen? You went from ski instruction to statistics. JULIAN: Yeah, I was always impressed about watching stuff being made. I think it's a very relaxing thing to do. And I always wanted to become an engineer. When I was five years old, I wanted to become a ship engineer. So it was always clear that I wanted to do something with manufacturing and mechanical engineering. So I started actually doing my bachelor's in Vienna at Technische University. And for my master's, I moved to Zurich and studied Industrial Engineering. ETH has historically been very strong in machine learning research. Every student, no matter if you're interested or not, gets exposed to machine learning, statistics, and AI. It caught my attention. I thought there were very interesting things you can do when you combine both. So that's how I ended up doing research on interface and becoming an entrepreneur in this area. TROND: Yeah, we'll talk about your entrepreneurship in a moment. But I wanted to go to your dissertation, Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing: Augmenting Humans at Work. That is very close to our interests here at the podcast. Tell me more about this. JULIAN: There is a lot of h