Title: "Project Michelangelo: trying to move towards the future of machining"
Abstract: In the age of the fourth industrial revolution, many fields have experienced significant breakthrough that are changing the way we interact with tools and devices and - ultimately - the way we live. The common denominator enabling these disruptive advancements goes under many names but it is generally related to advanced ICT technologies and AI or AI-like systems. Curiously enough, the very one sector on which all the industrial society is built - production systems and machine tools in particular - is still lagging behind and still hooked to an incremental development cycle. This talk aims at giving to non-technologists a glimpse on today's typical design-setup-machine-inspect production cycle, at introducing one of the recent efforts made on freeing that process from human expertise and supervision, and finally at suggesting possible routes to introducing AI in machining.