The IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA) is one of the world's most important technical conferences for emerging technologies in the context of factory automation, and this year marked its 25th anniversary. The goal of the international conference is to disseminate new ideas, emerging trends, research findings and practical results. ETFA 2020 was held for the first time in a hybrid format from September 08 to 11. For this, the organizing committee planned a full on-site event, with the possibility of online participation. "By organizing it in virtual meeting rooms, we as participants had an experience that was very close to the real conference," describes Anton Pfeifer, research associate at the Institute for Industrial Information Technology (inIT).
Together with Fraunhofer IOSB-INA, inIT represented the research center in Lemgo and a total of 13 scientists actively participated in the conference online or on site.
The two research assistants working at inIT, Christoph-Alexander Holst and Anton Pfeifer, organized the special session "Challenges of Machine Learning in Intelligent Technical Systems" together with Diana Göhringer from the Technical University of Dresden. The session addressed the requirements of technical systems for machine learning. The challenges here lie in the nature of the available data, resulting in uncertainties, conflicts, incompleteness, and low quality.
Another Special Session was organized by inIT staff members Dr. Lukasz Wisniewski, Professor Henning Trsek and Marco Ehrlich together with Fraunhofer IOSB-INA colleagues Professor Jürgen Jasperneite and Sebastian Schriegel. They addressed the topic "Industrial Internet for the Factories of the Future" with the aim of bringing together experts from various fields such as IT, telecommunications and automation to discuss and elaborate on the challenges in the field of industrial communication in the factories of the future.
In addition to presenting the special session content, Dr. Lukasz Wisniewski and Professor Henning Trsek were also involved in the ETFA organizing committee and made an important contribution and extraordinary effort to allow the conference to take place in the form it did. Trsek took over the Industry Day Co-Chair and Wisniewski held the Work-in-Progress Co-Chair for the fifth time in a row. An excellent commitment, which makes inIT visible within and outside the ETFA community.
Also in this particular form as a hybrid conference, ETFA2020 offered a unique opportunity to exchange ideas with industry leaders and a wide range of experienced researchers, developers and practitioners from various industries, research institutes and universities. This enabled partnerships to be developed and established, and new ideas to be generated. Next year, ETFA2021 will be held in Västerås, Sweden.