Early January this year, ISSIP participated in another Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS). This has become an ISSIP tradition since we started our collaboration in 2015, thanks to the outstanding efforts of the ISSIP Ambassador to HICSS, Dr. Haluk Demirkan.
Why is HICSS such a great fit for ISSIP to sponsor?
- System science is foundational to service innovation, Service science.
- Many members of ISSIP are already active in HICSS.
- HICSS is a great conference for ISSIP to expand its reach to the systems-minded IS academic community.
- HICSS provides a great platform for industry-academic collaboration.
This year in addition to sponsoring the conference, ISSIP members held two half-day workshops, chaired tracks and mini tracks, and sponsored the ISSIP-IBM-UW (University of Washington) Best Paper Awards.
The workshop on “Future of Work – The role of Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Augmentation in defining the future of work” was structured in 2 parts. During the first part, our distinguished speaker – Pankaj Srivastava, IBM, Dan Russell, Google, Jim Spohrer, IBM, Kevin Crowston, Syracuse, Terri Griffith, Santa Clara University – opened the conversation around topics such as the nature of work & learning, leveraging AI for reskilling, and importance of entrepreneurship in the age of AI. The second part consisted of interactive breakout sessions around those topics. The outcome of the workshop will be a white paper currently under development thanks to our lead author, Vaida Meskauskiene, Åbo Akademi University, and more than a dozen workshop contributors. So stay tuned….
In our second workshop on AI Biases (chaired by Rama Akkiraju, IBM Distinguished Engineer, and ISSIP Past President) our distinguished panelist (shown below) debated the topic of ‘AI and Bias’ from various angles including how to prepare training data that is ‘fair’, establishing ‘fairness’ measurement metrics for building AI systems, the role of data preparers and data collection platforms in creating fair AI models, alternative techniques to detecting, measuring, assessing and fixing undesirable biases in AI models.
Please find the full workshop goals, description, Bios of panelists, and key-takeaways here: http://bit.ly/ISSIP-AIBias. Martha Russell’s wonderful summary blog post of AI-and-Bias workshop can also be found here: https://mediax.stanford.edu/news/put-ai-in-the-human-loop/.
This year ISSIP/IBM/UW Award Committee considered papers for “BEST INDUSTRY STUDIES PAPER: Let’s Move the Field Forward.” The committee received 28 nominations and accepted 21 excellent papers. The top five winners were:
- First Place. Crossing the Uncanny Valley? Understanding Affinity, Trustworthiness, and Preference for More Realistic Virtual Humans in Immersive Environments by Mike Seymour, Lingyao Yuan, Alan R. Dennis, Kai Riemer
- Second Place. Skimping on Gas – Reducing Ethereum Transaction Costs in a Blockchain Electricity Market Application by Taneli Hukkinen, Juri Mattila, Kari Smolander, Timo Seppälä, Tobias Goodden
- Third Place- DecidArch: Playing Cards as Software Architects by Patricia Lago, Jia F. Cai, Remco C. de Boer, Philippe Kruchten, Roberto Verdecchia
- Fourth Place – RoboTalk – Prototyping a Humanoid Robot as Speech-to-Sign Language Translator by Daniel Christian Homburg, Mirja Sophie Thieme, Johannes Völker, Ruth Maria Stock
- Fifth Place – Robust Look-ahead Three-phase Balancing of Uncertain Distribution Loads by Xinbo Geng, Swati Gupta, Le Xie
Last but not least, during HICSS 52, ISSIP President, Heather Yurko, and Society of Serviceology President, Kazuyoshi Hidaka signed a Memorandum of Understanding to strengthen the two organizations collaboration.