Digital Twins is one of the important technology concepts in Industry 4.0. Traditionally, manufacturers have used many proven methods and technologies and in fact, management principles to improve quality costs, productivity, sacral time and manufacturing. Just like total quality management, kind of emphasis on physical processes and then training people. All of those are still important but, as we talked about, some of the emerging technology trends are actually building new capabilities or bringing new capabilities to the manufacturers, that they can completely re-imagine how they would manufacture products and how they would service the product, and how they would engage the customers, and so on. Digital twins in that context is one of the important technologies. In short, digital twins actually brings together the capabilities of IoT applications and that we talked about in the earlier course, and then the capabilities for simulation and modeling in a digital format and putting it all together, it actually brings the possibility of a pure virtual product, a virtual version of real product. With this virtual version, manufacturers can do so many things like simulation, what if analysis, getting real-time information about how the product is being used by the customers or how it's being manufactured and then work on the data, draw insights from data to further improve the product and customer experience. That's the summary of what digital twins are, and we're going to be launching into this course talking about various aspects of this technology. This technology actually can bring together as complex products as an aircraft, you can have a complete digital version of a physical aircraft, and that opens up so many possibilities for improving the overall manufacturing operations. Our broad learning objectives in this course, we'll focus on what are digital twins and how do they work? Then how does digital twins get successfully implemented? Because again, while the possibilities are great, but the implementation can become complex and manufacturers have to be careful in terms of how they navigate that process. We will talk about the broad business advantages. What are the kind of business value propositions of this technology coming to the manufacturers and the various stakeholders in the ecosystem, including suppliers and customers. We would address some of the risks and challenges that comes with the technology and finally, we'll spend some time talking about the future trends that we can expect in this technology. Our mode of delivery in this course will include video lectures, just like what we're doing now, and in addition, we'll have additional case studies for reading materials, will have reflection exercises, assessments. In addition, we'll also have some leading industry experts who have been generous to donate time and join me in a conversation for us to learn about digital twin, this whole technology and its applications. Some of the experts who will be joining us are the following. We have Dr. Annie Zeng from Ford Motor Company. She's the digital innovation specialists in advanced manufacturing. We have Jayanta Banerjee. He was the group CIO in the Tata Steel Group, one of the largest steel manufacturers in the world. From Siemens we have three leading experts. We have Kathleen deValk, who's the chief architect and head of global architecture for MindSphere. MindSphere by the way, is one of the very popular platforms from Siemens that's used in many organizations for both IoT applications and Digital Twins applications. We have Nash Chakraborty again from Siemens, who's the Senior Director for global market development and Cloud applications on MindSphere. Finally, we have Stephan Jockusch, who is the vice president for strategy at Siemens.
