Artificial Intelligence (AI)
With the recent mainstream availability of artificial intelligence (AI), Microtrace has explored practical applications of AI across a wide range of topics relevant to the microanalytical laboratory, including scientific instrumentation, data evaluation, and analytical problem solving.
In the same way that our laboratory staff has approached the implementation of a new analytical instrument—such as Raman microspectrophotometry in the early 2000s—by applying it broadly to a range of questions in order to explore capabilities, limitations and applications, we have adopted a similar exploratory approach to AI. Rather than focusing on a single task, we have pursued a range of questions to gain experience with where these tools can be informative, where they are unreliable, and how they might be applied to the one-off questions that arise on a daily basis.
Artifical intelligence must be treated carefully in the laboratory environment. At times, approaches to AI have generated novel insights that have been worthy of further pursuit; however, other inquiries have produced outputs that were incomplete, misleading, or patently incorrect. It is essential that experts in the discipline curate the products of artificial intelligence. Microtrace’s scientific staff have the extensive scientific and computing knowledge necessary to prepare, manipulate, and interpret artificial intelligence programs and data.
Mictotrace has pursued many real world applications of artificial intelligence in the laboratory, including: the integration of an existing database to monitor a live stream of instrumental data through AI-assisted coding and integration; the evaluation of proprietary instrumental file formats to not only extract data but gain insight into the interpretation algorithms captured within the dataset; the examination of relationships among samples in complex, multi-instrument, multivariable datasets; and the analysis of photomicrographs.
Rather than presenting AI as either a solution or a curiosity, Microtrace’s scientific staff pursues practical applications. Borrowing an apt phrase from Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels, Microtrace assesses AI generated results manually, using “the light of experience as guided by intelligence.”
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