Kurt DeMaagd, Ph.D., is Chief AI Officer and Co-founder at Sight Machine. He has developed Machine Learning applications for a variety of manufacturing verticals and use-cases, with a strong focus on digital transformation and ensuring that results are proven useful on the plant floor. Examples include root causes analytics for micro-stops, predictive maintenance applications for robotics in automotive and industrial machinery, prescriptive energy optimization and waste reduction for glass manufacturing, decision support tools for quality improvement, and schedule optimization that blends supply chain and manufacturing plant floor data. Kurt has presented on big data and analytics at trade conferences, such as the Nvidia GTC, Microsoft Build, Microsoft Ignite, Qatar Economic Forum, Automate, the American Society for Quality, and multiple presentations at the ASQ Statistic Division conference. In addition, he has over 30 academic papers and presentations in journals, conferences and edited books. He is a co-author of “Practical Computer Vision with SimpleCV”, an O’Reilly published book on developing computer vision applications. He is co-inventor on two patents for using data and computer vision in manufacturing applications. Previously, he was a professor at Michigan State University in Information Management, Economics and Policy, where managed over $15MM in grant funding and regularly ranked as a top faculty member in the department for teaching evaluations. He was also a co-founder of Slashdot.org and served on the board of directors of The Perl Foundation. Kurt has a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Michigan, Ross School of Business, where he was a STEIT Fellow. He also has a BS in Computer Science from Hope College.