Manufacturing is one of the few activities in an economy that generates real wealth (as opposed to shuffling existing wealth around). Research on ways to do it better is of the utmost social interest, and advanced techniques of machine intelligence have much to offer this agenda. So this volume's title generates great expectations. Readers deserve chapters outlining path-breaking research contributions in industrial-strength machine intelligence, and discussions of how existing AI techniques can be translated into the nitty-gritty domain of real-world application. Several articles in this volume of contributed essays do satisfy these expectations, but most fall short, either because they do not use computational techniques that one would recognize as "intelligent," apply established AI techniques to toy problems of little practical concern in industry, or both.
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