Journey from B2B, Boiler to Banking and CFD to AI to Quantum…

This blog is about my personal journey from manufacturing to IT and the similarity in its diversity…

Process Analogy

In manufacturing or IT world, we apply different techniques/frameworks to design or enhance processes and products. One such six sigma driven methodology in manufacturing world talks about 3 Ms: Man, Machine and Methods and then we had an extension with 4th M: Material.

Then I entered altogether a different world of IT, with a thought that I need to unlearn to learn. But what, IT world just changes these 3 Ms to People, Process and Technology. Thats great! Not so different which I thought so. And hey they too added one more attribute called “Data” which is analogous to “Material” from Manufacturing world.

Data is the raw material of the IT world

Product Analogy

Ok so processes or methods are not really different, so I could use it. Let’s get to product from manufacturing world and understand the design process.

In heat transfer and fluid mechanics world, we say all the problems in the world can be solved using 3 fundamental equations:

Mass Balance, Momentum Balance and Energy Balance…

Definitely these equations will not be required in AI world. But wait, what exactly is mass balance telling me? Flow of mass or material in the given space or domain. Oh! but I always learn/understand Data Flow in a given domain while defining my AI problem. So mass balance is useful 😁 (Happy)

Ok now, What momentum balance is telling me? The momentum or velocity or rate of movement across the given space. Hey even that is what I do to understand the velocity of data flow in a given process. Whether its real time or in batches and the sources as well, which were part of mass balance!. Momentum balance is also useful 😁 (Happy again)

OK what about Energy Balance? It tells me how much energy is spend or dissipated or consumed or generated … CONSERVED. Hey thats a real coincidence I happen to understand the effort spend on data management/wrangling (jargon) by various stakeholders at different touchpoint. Effect of which leads to different mass ..oh sorry…different data/insights/feature at the output of each process. But effort is Energy, right! Even this is sounding similar.. 😁 (Very Happy).

So frankly, it’s all converging. It does not matter what domain are you from as long as you know how to draw analogies from your personal and professional experience.

Even Amazon compares cloud computing value proposition to Electricity!

Definitely knowledge is a domain agnostic product.

I mentioned about Quantum Computing in the title and I will write about it in the next blog. I will show, how fluid flow can be solved using QUBO modeling and on a Quantum Computer and how it compares to any other resource optimization problem across domains…

Science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity in the most remote parts — Ralph Emerson