Artificial Intelligence

At GE, Artificial Intelligence (AI) development is primarily focused on connecting minds and industrial machines to enable intelligent and user-friendly products and services that move, cure and power the world. GE Research spearheads this charter via the invention and deployment of AI solutions that can execute on industrial devices, at the edge or in the cloud.

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

AI research is practiced as a multidisciplinary exercise at GE, where insights from data-driven machine learning is fused with domain-specific knowledge drawn from areas such as materials, physics, biology and design engineering, to amplify the quality as well as causal-veracity of the predictions derived—what we call hybrid AI. We are creating state-of-the-art perception and reasoning capabilities for our AI technology to observe and understand contextual meaning, to improve the performance and life of our assets, industrial systems and human health. We are developing continuous learning systems that teach or learn from other assets or agents and learn from real and virtual experiences to understand and improve behavior.

Some key challenges we tackle include a lack of sufficient labels needed for traditional supervised learning approaches, the need to ingest and link multiple data modalities, and the need to build AI solutions that are interpretable due to safety-related regulatory requirements.

State-of-the-art capabilities in computer vision, machine learning, knowledge representation, reasoning and human system interactions are used to robustly monitor, assess and predict the performance and health of assets—information that, when coupled with uncertainty quantification and assurance, provides the information needed to multi-objectively optimize customer-specific metrics. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Benefits

Examples of customer outcomes enhanced by AI products include reduced downtime on assets through AI-driven proactive intervention (for e.g., airline delays and cancellation), increased throughput (for e.g., optimal control of wind turbine settings to maximize farm output), or reduced costs (for e.g., optimal power plant operation to minimize fuel costs). GE Research is developing and integrating artificial intelligence in healthcare by working to incorporate the technology into every aspect of the patient journey (for e.g., improved disease diagnosis, augmenting doctors and clinicians by increasing workflow efficiencies to save precious time).
 
In addition to asset-awareness and management, active AI research areas include Computer Vision, automation, autonomy, User Experience, Augmented Reality and Robotics.