DIAL's Torben Jess had a unique opportunity to work as an intern with Boeing Research and Technology in St Louis for three months.

Torben Jess a PhD student at the Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory had a unique opportunity to join Boeing Research and Technology as an intern. Torben spent nearly three months with Boeing Global Technology in Saint Louis from June to September 2015.

Part of his internship was to work on a project investigating the potential of Industry 4.0 for Boeing. The aim was to find interesting project opportunities for Boeing Research and Technology with Industry 4.0 in Germany.

Industry 4.0 is a funding scheme initiated by the German government to improve the productivity of the manufacturing industry. The aim of Industry 4.0 is to use various upcoming technologies such as 3D printing, RFID tags, or augmented reality to make manufacturing more flexible. The increased flexibility should enable manufacturing companies to produce smaller batch sizes at a higher rate and therefore increase productivity and customer satisfaction. These are exactly the challenges currently faced by the Boeing organisation making it a good fit and highly interesting for Boeing. Combined with the interest of Boeing as an organisation being more and more interested in international operations industry 4.0 seemed like a good opportunity to incorporate more of the advanced manufacturing technologies into Boeing.

In addition Torben used the opportunity to test part of his PhD research and research from the Aladdin project. With Torben's PhD coming to an end and the Aladdin project currently being in the transition period it was a great opportunity to get additional practical insights into the data management practices within Boeing.

During his time at Boeing Torben had the chance to visit various Boeing sites in the US. He also  attended the Boeing Technology conference in Los Angeles and learn more about the current research challenges within Boeing. This internship gave Torben the opportunity to get some practical experience and a better understanding of the Boeing organisation which can help Torben to understand industry and further improve the DIAL Boeing cooperation.

Please contact tj282@cam.ac.uk for further information.