Simon Johnson, Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management

November 1, 2023

MIT economist Simon Johnson shares the key insights from his book, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, highlighting impediments to shared prosperity in prior technology revolutions, and the changes to business and regulatory contexts that we should make to achieve equitable growth in the age of AI.

Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor Department of Informatics at UCI 

Our personal technologies have been designed to extend our capabilities, yet in decades of Dr. Mark’s research, many people report feeling exhausted and stressed when using their personal devices. A main goal in knowledge work has been to maximize productivity; Dr. Mark reframed that goal, especially for managers and team leaders, to instead optimize employee wellbeing. Dr. Mark discussed how reasons for it can be tied to workplace environments and the broader sociotechnical world we live in.  She also described how, contrary to the idea that we are either focused or unfocused, our attention is far more nuanced. We have rhythms of focused attention throughout the day, but we also experience other types of attention which can provide benefits. 

Vibhanshu Abhishek, Associate Professor of Information Systems the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California – Irvine

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm, and in just a few short weeks it has skyrocketed to more than 100 million users. ChatGPT has been used to write children’s books, advertising copy, and even pass a Wharton exam. In this talk, we learned about the core technology, Large Language Models, that power ChatGPT-like technologies, where they work and where they fail, sometimes miserably! We also saw how the broader set of Generative AI tools work to produce images, videos, voiceovers and even proteins. This talk shed light on why it is one of the most powerful and “useful” inventions of our time. The implications of these advances are far-reaching and we teased out how they can impact fields as diverse as healthcare and literature.

Michael D Smith, Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at Carnegie Mellon University

Professor Smith discusses why higher education has been able to resist the forces of digital transformation that have altered so many other industries, why current market forces make higher education ripe for disruption, how disruption might impact structure and competition in the market for higher education, and what opportunities disruption could create for digitization research.

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UCI Paul Merage School of Business Professor and Founder of the UCI Center for Digital Transformation, Vijay Gurbaxani, was named a Distinguished Fellow of the INFORMS Information Systems Society (ISS). The award aims to recognize individuals who have made outstanding intellectual contributions to the information systems discipline.