Program_Overview | Agenda and Results of Shonan "Future of Work" Workshop

Program

Overview

The meeting started with talks by organizers followed by a mixture of lightning talks, working groups, and talks by the groups.
Working groups create written outcomes and exchange the results after each session.
The talks by participants and groups served as inputs for working groups in next sessions. The steps are as follows.

1. Started with three groups that discuss issues from different perspectives.

Each group developed scenarios in the future of work (data-centric work, other online work, and offline work), identified issues that need to be addressed. The three groups are as follows:

1

Cross-discipline research group

This group discusses research challenges in different areas and those that require cross-discipline research for the future of work systems.

2

ELSI (Ethical, Legal, Social Issues) group

This group develops ELSI considerations and new opportunities in the future of work.

3

Applications and Benchmarks group

This group discusses applications and then benchmarks that will be effective in evaluating platforms.

2. Based on the results of the three working groups, we identified seven core aims, referred to as Intellectual Challenges (ICs in short), and the key entities and relationships among them that form a future of work reference architecture, into which the seven ICs are connected.

The identified ICs are as follows:

1

IC1: Capturing Human Characteristics and Capabilities

This IC explores how to augment the ability to understanding different types of human roles in future jobs, modeling the inherent uncertainty in human behavior by understanding their evolving characteristics and be able to propose jobs to them by adapting to their changing perceptions, needs, and skills.

2

IC2: Stakeholder Requirement Specification

This IC investigates how to add the capabilities of all stakeholders involved in the new job ecosystem to specify their requirements and needs.

3

IC3: Social Processes

This IC addresses the development of appropriate interaction methodologies to provide onboarding, socializing, and training for workers, as well as ways to delegate work between humans and humans and machines.

4

IC4: Platform Ecosystems

This IC reflects on the design of Future of Work platforms, by emphasizing on Interoperability issues, interaction with the platform environment, communication between platforms, and also human-human / human-machine communication.

5

IC5: Computation Capabilities

This IC investigates computational challenges to enable desired characteristics described in other ICS, including, but not limited to the design of personalized, adaptive utility functions for different stakeholders in FoW ecosystem, designing principled algorithms, as well as providing data management capability for effective data analysis.

6

IC6: Benchmarks and Metrics

This IC explores Benchmarking and development of appropriate metrics to measure computing capabilities as well as human aspects such as satisfaction, human capital advancement, and equity.

7

IC7: Ethics

Questions concerning the security of the data describing individuals, access to the data, how the data are being used, and consent to provide such data are some of many other ethical issues that are discussed in this IC.

3. Then, we formed the seven groups corresponding to the seven ICs, each of which focuses on the state of art and concrete challenges in each IC.