Developing Skills to Work in the Age of Intelligent Machines: Pre-HICSS workshop

Submission : Extended abstract submission by 20 December 2018

The skills needed from human to face the new work market and to collaborate with intelligent machines has generated a lot of concern of researchers from different disciplines. Intelligent machines are both material (e.g., robots) and immaterial (e.g., algorithms) computing technologies that can be characterized by autonomy, the ability to learn, and the ability to interact with other systems and with humans. This new era enquires to increase transdisciplinary language and convergence in research and to identify the need resources for working in this new era.

This workshop aims to promote discussions about the required skills and ideas for support research related to humans' skills and the collaboration with intelligent machines among participants. It aims to bring together researchers from diverse disciplines with a shared interest in work and intelligent machines. More ambitiously, we intend for the workshop to provide an impetus and venue for disciplinary convergence: “the deep integration of knowledge, techniques, and expertise from multiple fields to form new and expanded frameworks” (NSF, 2017). To address the challenges of work and intelligent machines requires integrating perspectives and knowledge and skills related to labor, motivation, cognition, machine learning, human learning and systems design, among others, in coherent ways.

Convergent research can build the deep and systematic knowledge required to engage the complex questions that need to be addressed when considering a future in tandem with intelligent machines; even more pressing, convergent ideas are required to design work that both leverages expanding technological capabilities and technologies and also serves workers at the same time.

Goals

The workshop is designed to advance three-specific goals related to human skills to create convergent and transdisciplinary research on this subject.

  • First, identifying required skills to work with intelligent machines: a key distinguishing feature of convergence research is that it is centered around a challenging real-world problem (the dramatic and inevitable changes in the labor market).
  • Second, identifying transdisciplinary research themes for future collaboration: by creating a wide view about the subject, we will work to create a common language among interdisciplinary researchers about the problems, phenomena, and issues surrounding work with intelligent machines. This language base can act as a boundary object to connect researchers and research done in disparate disciplines.
  • Third, we want to define resources and technologies needs to facilitate convergence research within the HICSS community and beyond. An important aspect is to define use of technologies to support virtual collaborations that support convergence research. Also, to discuss challenging transdisciplinary research problems about skills to work in age of intelligent machines.

Workshop activities aim to provoke reflection over labor change and strive to generate high-impact research ideas to promote a transdisciplinary language for researching the work in the age of machines.

Participation

We invite participants to submit a short position statement that expresses your interest in intelligent machines and the aspects related to the main skills to work. We encourage participation from any disciplinary perspective, including (but not limited to) human resources, urban planning, computer science, sociology, information systems, transportation, economics, psychology, law, media studies, engineering, public policy, artificial intelligence—any perspective that can help foster convergent thinking around this increasingly important topic in our society.

Statements should be submitted at . The deadline to register online for the SWTs is 20 December 2018.

Venue

The Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - HICSS
Workshop SWTs on IT and Society
1pm – 4pm, January 8, 2019

Organizers

Elaine Mosconi, Université de Sherbrooke
Kevin Crowston, Syracuse University
Jeffrey Nickerson, Stevens Institute of Technology

Sponsorship

This workshop is part of a series sponsored by the Research Collaboration Network on Work in the Age of Intelligent Machines (NSF IIS-1745463).

Contact

All questions about submissions or the workshop submission should be emailed to

Date: 
Tuesday, January 8, 2019 - 13:00