MSOE’s AI Club and Brady Corporation teamed up to host Innovation Labs: Hands-on Industry AI Innovations on Dec. 7 in Diercks Hall. This was the inaugural year for Innovation Labs and provided students with and unique, hands-on opportunity to bridge the gap between academia and real-world applications. Students were given two months and mentor guidance to perfect their solutions before presenting to the judges.

The theme of this year’s Innovation Labs was “Getting Creative with Liquids.” In many industries, the ability to accurately measure liquid levels within containers is crucial. This can impact a wide range of sectors, from manufacturing and environmental monitoring to health care and consumer goods. However, many traditional methods of assessing liquid quantities can be inefficient, inaccurate or costly to implement at scale. That’s where Brady Corporation was looking for students to utilize AI to create solutions.

Innovation Labs kicked off on Oct. 10 when representatives from Brady Corporation asked students to design an AI-based solution that can predict the amount of liquid in a container from a single image, as well as other features. The problem statement and asked, “Help our lab customers streamline their work by transforming images into useful data! Your challenge is to develop a system that not only measures liquid volume with high accuracy but also captures other essential information such as liquid color, container dimensions and any additional relevant data points.”

To help students get started, AI-Club provided participants with a baseline solution using the YOLOv8 segmentation algorithm. Teams were asked to build upon this foundation to create a more innovative and adaptable solution that can be applied across multiple use cases.

Teams presented their final projects to Brady Corporation and other industry leaders on Dec. 7 in Diercks Hall. A total of 60 students from both MSOE and UW-Milwaukee participated in the inaugural Innovation Labs. AI Club hopes to incorporate students from universities across Wisconsin at future events.

The top three teams were awarded personalized recommendation letters as well as $2,500 for first place, $1,500 for second place and $1,000 for third place. All teams were awarded a general recommendation letter for completing the event along with a customized T-shirt.

• First Place: Liquid Boogaloo
• Team Members: Bjarne Baasch, Belinchon Garrido-Lestache, Owen Jacobsen, Travis Jankowski, Mitchell Johnstone, Alexander Lopez, Patrick Rafferty, Joshua Schelonka, Gabrielle Sladek
• Second Place: Liquid Lens
• Team Members: Sebastian Dolecki, Zakary Goetter, Caleb Gray, Austin Koske, Jack LeCloux, Isabella Ruiz, Ishita Samrit, Miles Trompeter, Vlad Wilson
• Third Place: UW-M

o   Team Members:  Josh Dascoli, Eyas Mohammed Hamdan, Grant Jones, Ethan Miller, Nick Murawski, Cal Pinkerton, Adam Polak, Gurleen Singh, Matthew Owen Zimmer