2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

NSF ATE funded Initiatives for Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing Technician Education

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session I

This National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education (NSF ATE) National Center aims to address the need for a highly skilled technician workforce at the two-year college level through its network of advanced manufacturing stakeholders. With the exponential growth of smart technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), the Center developed new partnerships and initiatives to investigate how AI is used in the manufacturing industry and how it can be implemented in manufacturing technician education. The Center surveyed manufacturing companies to determine how they currently or plan to use AI. According to the survey, AI applications in the manufacturing sector commonly involve data collection and analytics, preprocessing, model training, deployment, and continuous optimization that drive automation, quality control, and decision-making in manufacturing.

The integration of smart technologies and AI in higher education and industry is reshaping how students learn, innovate, and prepare for technologically advanced careers. Colleges and universities are embedding AI tools and applications across discipline from data analytics, programming, and engineering design to equip students with skills directly aligned with industry demand. Through incorporating these technologies into research projects, higher education institutions expose students to every stage of the AI lifecycle from data engineering to model deployment to bridge academic theory and industrial application.

The Center tasked community college and university students with completing different stages of a research project that would result in simulating zero down time (ZDT) analysis on a CNC machine. Community college students focused on prompt engineering for overall research on ZDT and used AI to predict future performance on clean data through Python programming. University students then chose the correct sensors to acquire raw data, clean it using AI-promoted Python programming, and applied AI to predict the health of various CNC machine components.

Alignment between academia and industry ensures that graduates enter the workforce ready to operate, manage, and innovate within AI-integrated systems. The result is a new generation of professionals fluent in the necessary technical elements of AI, capable of supporting next-generation platforms in organizations that depend on automation, analytics, and machine learning to remain competitive in the global marketplace.

Authors

Prof. Karen Wosczyna-Birch National Center for Next Generation Manufacturing [biography]

Dr. Karen Wosczyna-Birch has been a champion of engineering and technology education for over 30 years. Since 1995, has served as the State Director of the CT College of Technology (COT) where her leadership has been instrumental in creating nationally recognized seamless pathway programs in engineering and technology between all 12 Connecticut public community colleges (now merged to CT State Community College) with 10 universities and technical and comprehensive high schools. She is also the Executive Director and Principal Investigator of the National Center for Next Generation Manufacturing (NCNGM), a National Science Foundation (NSF) Center of Excellence and a Professor Emeritus in Applied Technology at Connecticut State Community College Tunxis. She has received over $40M in funding from the NSF, including the Computer Science, Mathematics, and Physics Scholarship Program of Central Connecticut S-STEM grant and two grants for international partnership. Karen has implemented strategies resulting in an increase in the enrollment of underrepresented populations in STEM programs at the community colleges.

Karen has received numerous awards for her accomplishments as a professor and for her passion for increasing the diversity of the STEM population including the 2016 Distinguished Service Award from the international honor society Epsilon Pi Tau (EPT), the 2018 CT Women of Innovation Award in the Postsecondary Academic Innovation & Leadership Category, the 2012 New England Board of Higher Education Excellence Award for the State of CT and most recently, the 2020 High Impact Technology Exchange Conference’s Innovative Program of the Year Award and the 2021 International Technology Engineering Educators Association (ITEEA) Special Recognition Award and 2025 ITEEA Prakken Professional Cooperation Award. In 2014, she was invited to the White House College Opportunity Summit recognizing leaders like Karen for their commitment to STEM education. She also serves on numerous local and national boards including the Connecticut Technical Education and Career System, Charter Oak State College Academic Council, and Charter Oak State College Business & Technology Committee, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s TechAMP Advisory Board and Curriculum Committee.
Ms. Wendy Robicheau National Center for Next Generation Manufacturing [biography]

Wendy Robicheau is the Assistant Director for the National Center for Next Generation Manufacturing, funded by the National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education Program. She began working on NSF ATE grants for the Connecticut State Colleges & Universities System in 2012. Her work on these grants has grown her passion for making students, parents, educators and counselors aware of the educational and career pathways that are possible in STEM fields with an emphasis on advanced manufacturing. She has organized and participated in numerous local, national, and international initiatives over the years where she has both shared and learned about addressing STEM workforce needs and has also published and presented papers for these conferences. Wendy has her M.S. in Student Development in Higher Education from Central Connecticut State University.
Mr. Eric Paul Flynn

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on July 31, 2026

« View session