Beyond the Hype of AI
Navigating the Invisible Engineering Risks of Industrial AI use.
About
The integration of Artificial Intelligence across healthcare,energy and manufacturing has moved past the pilot stage and into mission critical infrastructure. While high level benefits are heavily celebrated - such as super human diagnostic triage,dynamic grid balancing and automated quality control - they often obscure severe operational risks.
Traditional software engineering frameworks treat code as a static,deterministic asset. Machine learning systems,however,are probabilistic,volatile and highly sensitive to environmental context.
We will examine the mechanics of 'data drift' - the process by which live AI models silently degrade over time without triggering standard system alerts - and the optimization hazards of 'reward hacking'.
Additionally the lecture will address the security vulnerabilities of poisoned data pipelines ,the human-factor risks of automation bias and the compliance challanges posed by black-box un-interpretability.
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Continuing Professional Development
This event can contribute towards your Continuing Professional Development (CPD) hours as part of the IET's CPD monitoring scheme.
11 Nov 2026
5:30pm - 7:30pm
Reasons to attend
Attendees will leave with a practical understanding of the invisible failure modes and actionable Machine Learning Ops. strategies to safely audit ,monitor and govern AI assets within complex engineering environments.
Programme
Gather for refreshments 17.30
Lecture start time 18.00
Lecture finish time 19.30
Event registration will be unavailable from 6pm on Thursday, 24 September 2026 until 9am on Friday, 25 September 2026.
We’re making upgrades to our event registration system.
On Thursday, 24 September 2026 from 6pm, our registration system will be temporarily unavailable while we upgrade our systems. For any urgent enquiries during this time, please email events@theiet.org and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
Thank you for your patience.
