Workshop report: Developing Skills to Work in the Age of Intelligent Machines (Pre-HICSS workshop)

Submitted by crowston on Sat, 2019-02-09 17:56

A workshop was held 1pm – 4pm, 8 January 2019 in Wailea, HI, before the annual Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences. It was the 4th workshop to be sponsored by the WAIM RCN. The workshop was organized by Elaine Mosconi, Université de Sherbrooke, Kevin Crowston, Syracuse University and Jeffrey Nickerson, Stevens Institute of Technology. The topic was "Developing Skills to Work in the Age of Intelligent Machines", though the discussion ranged more broadly. There were about 50 attendees. Notes from the workshop can be found at .

The session opened with brief introductions and an overview of the day. There were then two keynote talks to provide some common grounding for participants.

The first keynote was Prof. Dr. Dr. Ruth Stock-Homburg, Marketing and Human Resources Management, Technische Universität Darmstadt, who talked about the work she has been doing developing professional service robots. Her talk include a video of the robots interacting with a human-like robot named Elenoide, which was modelled on a real human.

The second keynote was Jim Spohrer who heads IBM Research's open-source AI work. He talked about the trends in AI and the implications for skills. His slides can be found at:

The group next reviewed the list of research questions developed in previous workshops and added some additional ones related to skills. These questions range from what skills are needed to work with intelligent machines, how systems are being used, how to design systems given what we know about work, system impacts, ethical and legal questions and so on.

The final section of the workshop was given to small group discussions about how some of these research questions might be addressed. Groups identified a number of possible sites to study and skills to examine.