Industry 4.0 and potential for reshoring: A typology of technology profiles of manufacturing firms

The paper analyses the trend towards reshoring processes in the field of manufacturing industry as a result of the massive digitisation of the technical solutions used by most product fields. The paper analyses the trend towards reshoring processes in the new productive scenario of industry 4.0 posed by the manufacturing industry because of the overall application of ICT and other technologies in their product fields. The incorporation of Industry 4.0 technologies (I 4.0 T) and the resulting digitalisation raises needs for technology adaptation in production plants that have strong territorial effects derived from the technological constraints linked to the adaptation process itself and that result, in many cases, in reshoring. Our analytical proposal takes a logical-formal point of view based on the cognitive composition of the technical solutions used by manufacturing industry, and draws up a typology of technology profiles to help determine the potential for reshoring among offshored plants and the difficulties that the process may entail. The results enable us to identify a growing role for reshoring processes, distinguishing different degrees of intensity depending on the characteristics of the technological scenario in which each plant is located, with the technological resources offered by its local setting playing a fundamental role

Larry Wos - Visions of automated reasoning

This paper celebrates the scientific discoveries and the service to the automated reasoning community of Lawrence (Larry) T. Wos, who passed away in August 2020. The narrative covers Larry's most long-lasting ideas about inference rules and search strategies for theorem proving, his work on applications of theorem proving, and a collection of personal memories and anecdotes that let readers appreciate Larry's personality and enthusiasm for automated reasoning

Education, Media and the End of the Book: Some Remarks from Media Theory

This paper sketches out an understanding of contemporary educational forms and practices from a vantage point afforded by recent German media studies. In so doing, it introduces a number of concepts from continental media theory. With the book – both as an artifact and an epistemic metaphor – in evident decline, what is taking its place is not any one new medium, but rather a radically new kind of media systematicity. By relentlessly reducing all content (e. g., music, film, text) to ones and zeros, digitization effectively erases the material characteristics of separate media forms, leaving behind only their conventionalized aesthetic qualities and forms. The paper builds on these arguments by concluding that the symbolic competencies which once constituted the core of all education (reading, writing, ‘rithmatic) are increasingly at odds with performative and stylistic abilities integral to this new mediatic order

The Hard and the Brut: A Journey through Parisian Brutalism

Developing from the production of the Brutalist Map of Paris (Blue Crow Media, 2016), this article maps out aspects of the aesthetics of concrete materiality in Parisian brutalism, from the late 1950s to the 1980s, a political aesthetics of the 'as found', before focusing on the material and spatial characteristics of the complex circulatory spaces of the work of Jean Renaudie, as problematic transitional zines between the city and Renaudie's combinatory system

Wittgenstein in the Machine

This article brings to light how AI research has benefited from post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. My research shows that Wittgenstein’s work began to engage the attention of AI researchers not only in the 1970s down to the present but right from the early beginnings of computational research in the 1950s. More specifically, his later philosophy inspired a group of researchers called the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) to start one of the first programs in machine translation, information retrieval, mechanical abstracting, and knowledge representation technologies in the early 1950s, all of which have later been claimed for AI and cognitive science. I focus on the philosophical work of CLRU founder Margaret Masterman and her extraordinary but forgotten contributions to ordinary language philosophy

Innovation: A Guide to the Literature

Innovation is not a new phenomenon. Arguably, it is as old as mankind itself. However, in spite of its obvious importance, innovation has not always got the scholarly attention it deserves. This is now rapidly changing, however. As shown in the paper, research on the role of innovation economic and social change has proliferated in recent years, particularly within the social sciences, and often with a bent towards cross-disciplinarity. It is argued that this reflects the fact that no single discipline deals with all aspects of innovation, and that in order to get a comprehensive overview of the role played by innovation in social and economic change, a cross-disciplinary perspective is a must. The purpose of the paper is to provide the reader with a guide to this rapidly expanding literature. In doing so it draws on larger collective effort financed by the European Commission (the TEARI project), one of the outputs of which will emerge as Oxford Handbook of Innovation, edited by Jan Fagerberg, David Mowery and Richard R. Nelson.