IESS is one of ISSIP’s priority conference sponsorships annually. In 2024, Jim Spohrer, our co-founder and board director spoke at the pre-conference events and workshops, delivered a keynote talk and assisted with judging best papers. Below are full proceedings of this important event, Jim’s highlights and pictures from other speakers, sponsors and participants. We look forward to IESS 2025!
Proceedings
The proceeding from the International Explorations of Service Science (IESS) conference are now online here – conference proceedings (open access). The IESS 2024 conference recordings and presentations can be found online here.
Best papers included:
Fostering citizens’ engagement in smart city within digital era by
Francesco Caputo (LI) (DC).
A review of AI-based trust management in smart cities by
Jessica Ohnesorg (LI) (DC), Nazek Fakhoury (LI) (DC), Noura Eltahawi (LI) (DC) and Mouzhi Ge (GS) (DC).
Intelligence Augmentation
The theme of the conferences was “Service Science to Promote Intelligence Augmentation” and the conference host Leonard Walletzky (LI)also mentioned the code-name of the conference was “Phoenix” to symbolize a restrengthening of the IESS community after the covid years in which submissions and attendance had dropped off.
The opening keynotes dealt with Service Science & Intelligence Augmentation: Past, Present, and Future Research Questions by Jim Spohrer (ISSIP, Board Member) and also Service platform for Smart Cities by Miroslav Svitek (LI) (prof. at Czech Technical University of Prague).
Pre-Conference Events
In addition to the conference, ISSIP’s Board Member Jim Spohrer (LI) provided a talk in the special seminar of Informatics colloquium for all academic staff members of the Faculty of Informatics. The talk was on the topic of the importance of T-shaped Skills in the AI Era (slides), for service scientists and everyone striving to keep up with accelerating change as a lifelong learner.
The pre-conference workshop included talks by Kyndryl practitioners on computing architectures and digital transformation for large enterprise businesses in finance, transportation, retail and other business and societal sectors. In addition, Jim Spohrer (LI) provided an opening talk that highlighted how the largest market cap companies in the world today are aimed at technology-driven transformation of business and society (while just 20 years ago big banks and big oil dominated), and both AI (Artificial Intelligence) and IA (Intelligence Augmentation) strategies will be impacted both by robots and AI digital twins of people.
Pictures & Highlights from Speakers, Sponsors, Hosts
Our thanks for the pictures in these LinkedIn posts from:
Program Committee – Luca Carrubbo (Italy) (Post)
Program Committee – Thang Le Dinh (Canada) (Click for Post)
Keynote Speaker – Miroslav Svitek (Czech Republic) (Click for Post)
Speaker and Awardee – Francesco Caputo (Italy) (Post)
Kyndryl (Co-Sponsor) – Maria Falkiewicz (Czech Republic) (Post)
Finally, let’s talk about Brno…
We are all very grateful to our local host Leonard Walletzky (LI) and the many local staff, students, and other helpers who contributed so much to the success of the event. Brno is a wonderful small city that combines the energy of Masaryk University student population, with historic medieval charm and Spilberk Castle, with modern high tech companies (Kyndryl, 4th largest employer in city with over 4000 employees, one of the sponsors of the conference along with ISSIP and other service system research and practice centers of excellence in Italy, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Romania, Austria, France, and the USA). Brno is home to well-known scientists and mathematicians through the ages including Gregor Mendel (biology, father of modern genetics) and Kurt Gödel (mathematician, incompleteness theorem). The word “robot” is of Czech language origin from Capek’s 1920 play “R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots”. (Karel Čapek was from Prague, not from Brno. The word „robot“ author is actually his brother, Josef Čapek – he used the Czech term for hard work „robota“ as the base and suggested it to Karel instead of „labours“, which he found too bookish.) Zdenko Stanicek, the founder of the service systems, management, and engineer (SSME) and smarter cities center at Masaryk University was present, and it was interesting to meet “the father of service science in the Czech Republic” and re-visit his many contributions to the conceptual modeling of service systems, including the “diamond model.”
IESS 2025 in Naples, Italy
Please plan to attend IESS 2025 in Naples, Italy at the amazing University of Naples Parthenope and hosted by Luisa Varriale (LI)