On May 8, TenForce was happy to host the 47th Meetup event: Industry 4.0 by Bigdata.be! The weather certainly did its part as people came together at the TenForce headquarters in Leuven to join in interactive talks on the bright future of Big Data. Delicious food, chilled drinks, and refreshing conversations!

Jetro Wils, Software Product Manager at TenForce, gave a to-the-point, inspiring presentation on the needs and pressure points the manufacturing, utility and governmental industries deal with in their diverse day-to-day operations. He showcased how TenForce helps these different industries tackle their respective problems in innovative ways, through predictive actions and analyses. He homed in on a TeTra (Technology Transfer) Project TenForce is collaborating on in association with KU Leuven: students at the DTAI-group and EAVISE use the TenForce software to monitor big sets of data in real-time and post-processing, related to time series (timestamps). They attempt to predictively derive patterns from this data.

Our Application Architect, Jonathan Langens, gave an electrifying talk on Big Data Europe, detailing how TenForce aids in this huge project. One example of BDE’s numerous projects was how sound data coming from the metal shell of a windmill propeller is used to predict when the propeller would break. The bulk of the presentation focused on a pilot program in which data analysis was performed on weather patterns in Europe, for which TenForce offered a custom open source tool, the Big Data Integrator (BDI), which lowers the threshold of use but obscured none of the complexity of the data it tackles.

Uroš Milošević, Semantic Technology Architect and Product Manager here at TenForce, gave a high-level, fast-paced presentation on SPECIAL, a European Commission project uniting a diverse host of international partners. The aim of SPECIAL is to provide a policy management framework, a transparency and compliance framework, and a scalable policy-aware Linked Data architecture. This soon sparked a lively discussion in the group on the coming GDPR regulations.

Youri Soons, a graduate intern at the Sitech Asset Health Center, gave the last talk of the evening, providing us with an enlightening and highly technical view into his research project: “Prescriptive maintenance on filters: The (ongoing) journey towards accurate RUL (Remaining Useful Life) predictions”. He gave us an overview of the maintenance possibilities for the high-use machinery used by big chemical plants, such as Arlanxeo and Borealis. Focusing on the innovations Industry 4.0 is bringing to the table, such as predictive maintenance or drones, Youri showed us how his own research could help accurately predict machine failures, with filter maintenance as a real-world application.

A lively evening at TenForce, filled with interesting discussion, was then concluded with drinks and chats as the sun had already set. Many thanks to BigData.be for the collaboration, fruitful as always, and for contributing to an inspiring evening. Many thanks as well to the speakers and to our guests!

You are welcome to join us for our next event! We will be sure to keep you posted on our social media channels. We hope to see you soon!