Technologies are fundamentally changing the nature of work. The challenge of understanding and designing work shared with intelligent machines requires a new interdiscipline to grow out of three current domains. The science of human organizing is focused on understanding how individuals, teams, organizations, and industries interact. Technologies focus on how human work can be facilitated by new technologies such as computational work design, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Finally, the emerging field of data science is focused on how data-intensive science and data-driven decision-making can transform work and organizations. Each of these three domains -- science of human organizing, technologies and data science -- are making breathtaking advances in understanding and enabling the future of work at the human-technology frontier. However, over the past decade, there has been a growing recognition by scholars that the loosely-connected networks in each of these three domains would benefit from better intellectual engagement. The purpose of this workshop is to facilitate that engagement with the goal of helping shape a research agenda at the intersection of these three areas.
This workshop is specifically geared towards charting a research agenda that is at the nexus of recent theoretical and empirical advances in three relatively disparate areas. First, the science of human organizing explores how work changes by novel forms of organizing enabled by technologies such as offshoring (and now reshoring), outsourcing and crowdsourcing, the gig economy and the sharing economy. The second domain of loosely-connected networks focuses on technologies to architect, design, implement and evaluate the platforms, algorithms, intelligent agents, embodied agents, robots as well as intelligent machines to facilitate the future of work at the human-technology frontier. The third domain explores data science methodologies that leverage advances in computing infrastructures and data streams to understand and enable the future of work at the human-technology frontier. While we have witnessed significant intellectual advances in each of these three areas, the challenge is to develop a research agenda that builds on the synergies across these three areas. The research agenda and ideas developed at the workshop will be a direct response to the promise of the future of work in society. To paraphrase the noted novelist and thought leader, William Gibson, the future is here -- but it is not evenly distributed. The goal of this workshop is to leverage recent technological advances but to temper the exuberance associated with technological developments with a reasoned and principled theoretical and empirical understanding of the social dynamics that are afforded by these technological developments.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
