\ Innovazione \ Area Science Park inaugurates research lab at Udine’s Lab Village

“Being involved with the University of Udine’s Lab Village,” says Professor Caterina Petrillo, President of Area Science Park, speaking at the inauguration of the Uniud Lab Village’s M12 AI area, “both through our artificial intelligence research lab and as a partner in the regional digital innovation hub IP4FVG, is a concrete first step in affirming Area Science Park’s collaboration with the University here in Friuli.”

Three DMIF-Imprese labs were presented at the event: beanTech, a space for businesses; the DIH Udine IP4FVG hub, applying data analysis and AI technologies to production processes; and Area Science Park’s research lab, focusing on unsupervised machine learning. The three labs are open to young talents and local businesses as a space to test 4.0 technologies and meet with sector experts, with the aim of kick-starting digital transformation processes.

The Area Science Park lab is run by the data science group at the organisation’s Research and Technology Institute and will be developing unsupervised algorithms on industrial data. Typical examples include automatically classifying industrial images for defect detection on production lines, and using unsupervised algorithms to analyse time series, to monitor company production lines with data collected by specific sensors. The new research lab can also count on the support of the Orfeo Data Centre, not only for providing the necessary computing power but also acting as a case study. They are already working on analysing the time series produced over a year and a half of production, in order to optimise the infrastructure’s energy cost using the algorithms that have been developed.

“This collaboration with the University of Udine is strategic for us,” President Petrillo added. “In addition to AI projects, it already spans other sectors such as genomics, and we intend to include other areas relevant to industrial research. I hope that this collaboration will also develop into joint training courses to promote the skills and specialisation that are essential today for bringing together research and enterprise.”