(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- In April, the Dimensional Metrology Group from the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Physical Measurement Laboratory (PML) hosted a three-day hands-on training event for 13 industry and government attendees. The class was given in response to an industry-identified need regarding lack of opportunities for training in uncertainty budget development for advanced measuring systems. NIST is an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

“Uncertainty training is usually very formal and mathematical,” says PML’s Ted Doiron, who developed and led the workshop, held Apr. 7–9 on NIST’s Gaithersburg campus. “In this workshop, the attendees physically measure the errors caused by each source of uncertainty, which we hope gives them a more physical intuition of uncertainty.”

Attendees included representatives from six accredited calibration labs, two unaccredited calibration labs, three government labs (representing the Army, the Navy, and Sandia National Laboratories), one manufacturing company, and one National Metrology Institute—the Trinidad and Tobago Bureau of Standards, a member of the Sistema Interamericano de Metrologia (SIM), which comprises metrology organizations from 34 countries in the Americas.

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