By The Boston Consulting Group

Our publications present our latest thinking on today’s most important business topics BCG’s publications present our latest thinking on today’s most important business topics. Through extensive surveys and rigorous analysis, our experts get to the heart of the issues that matter most to your business. We are always looking at the latest developments in all fields, exploring the trends that are essential for companies to consider in a rapidly changing competitive environment. We have a long history of generating groundbreaking ideas and breakthrough concepts that have become standard practice for business today. Search our site for the BCG publications that can help you create advantage in your particular area of interest. Latest Publications

Stephen Hawking: This will be the impact of automation and AI on jobs British scientist Prof. Stephen Hawking gives his 'The Origin of the Universe' lecture to a packed hall December 14, 2006 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Hawking suffers from ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Lou Gehrigs disease), which has rendered him quadriplegic, and is able to speak only via a computerized voice synthesizer which is operated by batting his eyelids. David Silverman/Getty Images Artificial intelligence and increasing automation is going to decimate middle class jobs, worsening inequality and risking significant political upheaval, Stephen Hawking has warned. In a column in The Guardian, the world-famous physicist wrote that "the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining."

CONSULTING - Careers-in-Consulting.Com: Your Guide to a Consulting Job The essence of management consulting is to help a client obtain information and advice which leads to real and lasting solution of a problem. Managing consulting is a growing area with good jobs available in the 2009-2010 time period. Consultants think, analyze, brainstorm, cajole and challenge good organizations to become even better by adopting new ideas. Great consultants are able to step into ambiguous, sometimes hostile situations and sense what changes need to be made. Great consultants are driven by ideas and a strong desire to have a positive impact on clients. This web site is designed to help you become a great consultant by presenting key information needed to enter consulting jobs including an overview of the industry, descriptions of firms and common practice areas, comparisons to other jobs, interviewing practice and advice and a discussion of some of the powerful ideas consultants are using to reshape organizations.

Understanding the 4 Types of A.I. The common, and recurring, view of the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence research is that sentient and intelligent machines are just on the horizon. Machines understand verbal commands, distinguish pictures, drive cars and play games better than we do. How much longer can it be before they walk among us? The new White House report on artificial intelligence takes an appropriately skeptical view of that dream. It says the next 20 years likely won’t see machines “exhibit broadly-applicable intelligence comparable to or exceeding that of humans,” though it does go on to say that in the coming years, “machines will reach and exceed human performance on more and more tasks.” But its assumptions about how those capabilities will develop missed some important points.

Cognizant Technology Solutions A paperless ICU and better post-op care Narayana Health Open-heart surgery patients at Narayana Health are living longer, healthier lives as a result of the hospital’s paperless intensive care unit, where a family of iPad apps integrates with medical equipment to feed medical teams instant, relevant patient data that improves care during the critical first hours after surgery. Cognizant collaborated with Narayana Health to develop an automated and digitally transformed ICU system that brings a single, accurate window on patient status to an iPad at each patient’s bed. Leveraging data from equipment, lab, imaging, clinicians and patient records into a single source of truth improves handoffs from shift to shift and control of infection risk throughout the unit, and leaves fewer opportunities for human error. Patient monitoring and care is dramatically improved, as is the success rate of the life-saving procedure.

How will you prepare your kids for the world of work? A wise old sage once told me that being parent is like being an archer complete with bow and arrow—your kids are your arrows and your job as a parent is to take aim, fire, and with fingers crossed hope they hit their mark. I liked that analogy because one of my kids is about to select her options for her exams at 16 and thoughts all round are turning to what she wants to do. Being part of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work, means for once she might actually listen to what I have to say! Last week’s FT was awash with stories about robots and the great hallowing out of the professional class but don’t rush out to sound the death knell of the job or career just yet.

The case for digital reinvention Digital technology, despite its seeming ubiquity, has only begun to penetrate industries. As it continues its advance, the implications for revenues, profits, and opportunities will be dramatic. As new markets emerge, profit pools shift, and digital technologies pervade more of everyday life, it’s easy to assume that the economy’s digitization is already far advanced. According to our latest research, however, the forces of digital have yet to become fully mainstream.

Research Blog: Using Machine Learning to Explore Neural Network Architecture Posted by Quoc Le & Barret Zoph, Research Scientists, Google Brain team At Google, we have successfully applied deep learning models to many applications, from image recognition to speech recognition to machine translation. Typically, our machine learning models are painstakingly designed by a team of engineers and scientists. This process of manually designing machine learning models is difficult because the search space of all possible models can be combinatorially large — a typical 10-layer network can have ~1010 candidate networks! Factories of the Future (FoF) - Research & Innovation - Key Enabling Technologies Industrial production accounts for 16% of Europe’s GDP and remains a key driver for innovation, productivity, growth and job creation. In 2009, 31 million persons were employed in the EU manufacturing sector, and each job in manufacturing generates at least an additional job in services. Moreover, nowadays 80% of the EU’s exports are manufactured products. However, Europe’s position as an industrial power house is eroding and its leadership in many important sectors is constantly challenged. In 2008, the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) for Factories of the Future (FoF) was launched under the European Economic Recovery Plan.

Business Process Management (BPM) Software Every organization has business processes—it’s how work is accomplished. But, too many organizations rely on outdated procedures, with reliance on paper forms or other manual steps. By becoming comfortable in how they get work done, leaders and workers alike cost their organizations a lot more than lost efficiencies. They lose sight of the opportunity cost of getting work accomplished the way “it’s always been done.” All businesses have one thing in common.

Lesson 9: UART – Simply Embedded An embedded system often requires a means for communicating with the external world for a number of possible reasons. It could be to transferring data to another device, sending and receiving commands, or simply for debugging purposes. One of the most common interfaces used in embedded systems is the universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART). When a board arrives in the hands of the software/firmware team, the first step is typically to get the debug console functional. The debug console is a serial interface which historically is implemented as RS-232 to connect with a PC serial port. Operations Management, Ph.D. - at Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany - PhDportal.com Procurement Broadly speaking, the research activities at the Endowed Chair of Procurement focus on the understanding – that is describing, explaining, and predicting – of phenomena and mechanisms that are of importance to the field of procurement. The current research thrusts are related to risk and disruptions, interfirm relationships, innovation and entrepreneurship, sustainability, and strategies and performance. The Operations Management programme is delivered by Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences, University of Mannheim. In these areas, we are particularly interested in research questions that are located at the intersection of procurement and related disciplines (such as logistics, marketing, management, organization, or innovation), because they require the integration of multiple disciplinary bases and theoretical perspectives to craft conceptually adequate models that offer comprehensive answers. Logistics and Supply Chain Management

Manufacturing.gov In a fiercely competitive global marketplace, innovation alone is no longer enough. Many nations, including the United States, are driving innovation to implementation through a whole-of-government approach. Accordingly, the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI) is working to create a competitive, effective, and sustainable manufacturing research-to-manufacturing infrastructure. The goal: enable U.S. industry and academia to solve the "scale-up" challenges that are relevant to industry. Photonics Institute Program Update Date: Monday, July 27, 2015

Cyber-Physical Systems - a Concept Map Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are integrations of computation, networking, and physical processes. Embedded computers and networks monitor and control the physical processes, with feedback loops where physical processes affect computations and vice versa. The economic and societal potential of such systems is vastly greater than what has been realized, and major investments are being made worldwide to develop the technology. The technology builds on the older (but still very young) discipline of embedded systems, computers and software embedded in devices whose principle mission is not computation, such as cars, toys, medical devices, and scientifi c instruments.