digiLab Academy: “AI in the Wild: Foundations in Machine Learning for Future Flight"

Lead Participant: DIGILAB SOLUTIONS LTD

Abstract

**Upskilling Future Flight Engineers and Analysts**

We are building a 3-month, part-time course which will upskill junior Future Flight engineers and analysts in their workplace. It's called "AI in the Wild: Foundations in Machine Learning for Future Flight". These engineers/analysts typically possess domain-specific knowledge about their systems and familiarity with their data. But the national AI/ML skills gap means that over 90% of data isn't even being used, and valuable insights are being missed. digiLab wants to change this.

**Course Structure**

Each month will include three weeks of lectures, practice exercises, and seminars; in the fourth week, we will deliver an in-person "hackathon" skills challenge, so that managers can see learning being put into action. We will also be keen to identify opportunities for further collaboration on Future Flight projects. Month 1 will teach Key Principles in ML; Month 2, Deep Learning; and Month 3, Probabilistic ML.

**Learning Outcomes**

It's called "AI in the Wild" for two reasons. Firstly, we want to empower learners to be able to tackle any problem independently, "in the wild': this will involve teaching not just how to use ML tools, but also how to approach new, unexpected, and varied data challenges. Secondly, through our extensive experience consulting for organisations operating in Future Flight sectors, we know that much of the data coming out of safety-critical environments or physically complex systems is "wild" - that is, messy or sparse. This could be due to malfunctioning sensors or an inability to acquire sufficient samples. So we will be teaching engineers how to reduce computational cost and increase confidence in their model outputs.

**Upskilling Benefits**

Upskilling employees increases productivity, retention, and wellbeing. Our course will accelerate business outcomes in Future Flight organisations and reduce their dependency on expensive external consultants to plug the in-house skills gap. Ultimately, the UK will benefit from the closing of the AI/ML skills gap and the acceleration of the Future Flight programme through the intelligent use of data.

Lead Participant

Project Cost

Grant Offer

 

Participant

DIGILAB SOLUTIONS LTD

Publications

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