Friday, August 11, 2023 | 4:30 – 6:00 p.m.

What does your Department Chair expect of you?

Panelists

  • Lakshmi Iyer – UNC Greensboro (Moderator)
  • Marie-Claude Boudreau – University of Georgia
  • Sue Brown – University of Arizona
  • Anitha Chennamaneni – Texas A & M University – Central Texas
  • Karlene Cousins – Florida International University
  • Leo Vijayasarathy – Colorado State University

The department chair’s role is multifaceted and is not well understood by all. A department chair’s responsibilities, which are both strategic and operational in nature, impact all departmental stakeholders. Accordingly, every faculty member should strive to understand how they can support and collaborate with their chair to develop and maintain a thriving work environment. Knowing what is expected in the first years of employment, what questions to ask, and how and when to be a team player are essential to one’s academic success. With a group of seasoned department chairs, this panel seeks to answer a variety of questions related to department chair expectations.

Friday, August 11, 2023 | 8:30 – 10:00 a.m.

The Role of Non-Tenure Track Faculty in Contemporary IS Departments

Panelists

  • Alexandre Barsi Lopes – Indiana University (Moderator)
  • Faiz Currim – University of Arizona
  • Simha Magal – Georgia State University
  • Gladys Simpson – Florida International University
  • Mark Thouin – University of Texas at Dallas

The need for qualified Information Systems (IS) faculty in IS departments remains high, given the career prospects for IS majors and the overall need for business students to learn more about technology to be better prepared for the job market (Madviwalla et al., 2022; Davis 2020). Non-Tenure Track (NTT) faculty have become a significant way to fulfill needs in IS departments. This situation is not unique to IS departments, however. A report published by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) indicates that about two thirds of all faculty in US schools are considered “contingent” (that is, off the tenure track) (Colby, 2021). Despite the prominence of NTT roles in IS departments, there has not been much discussion about the careers prospects for IS faculty pursuing NTT careers. This panel attempts to remediate that by focusing on the experiences of multiple senior NTT IS faculty.

Saturday, August 12, 2023 | 1:30 – 3:00 p.m.

Research on AI in a Rapidly Changing World

Panelists

  • Alan Dennis – Indiana University
  • Edona Elshan – University of St. Gallen
  • Jeff Jenkins – Brigham Young University
  • Lingyao (Ivy) Yuan, Iowa State University

Technology changes, and over the past year, we have seen dramatic changes in artificial intelligence (AI). The explosion of ChatGPT has revolutionized AI in general and conversational agents in particular (e.g., chatbots). Given that journal review cycles are typically several years, how do we as researchers approach this rapidly changing technology? How do we reconcile our research designs and their findings with technology that is out date because the technology changes faster than the review cycles? This panel will explore the challenges we face, and discuss some strategies and tactics researchers should consider as they study this rapidly changing area.

Thursday, August 110, 2023 | 1:00 – 2:30 p.m.

Isn‘t Data Everybody’s Business?

Panelists

  • Cynthia M. Beath – The University of Texas at Austin
  • Tania Prinsloo – University of Pretoria
  • Guillermo Rodríguez-Abitia – William and Mary
  • Jennifer L. Claggett, Wake Forest University
  • Gloria Phillips-Wren, Loyola University Maryland
  • Thilini Ariyachandra, Xavier University

If data really is everybody’s business, then everybody needs to know a lot more about data. But who is “everybody” and just what do they need to know? What are the key lessons that students should master? How should they learn these lessons? How can workers, managers, and politicians learn these lessons too? This panel will explore these questions and others. The panelists are experts on data and pedagogy. The panel will begin by using Mentimeter to assess the audience’s concerns about what, how, or when to deliver lessons about data for students, employees and citizens.

Saturday, August 12, 2023 | 8:30 – 10:00 a.m.

Writing across the great divide: Crafting papers for practitioner colleagues and partners

Panelists

  • Maung Kyaw – Sein University of Southeastern Norway and Kristiania University College, Norway (Moderator)
  • Munir Mandviwalla – Temple University, USA
  • Sandeep Purao – Bentley University, USA
  • Ilias Pappas University of Agder, Norway and Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
  • Ana Paula Tavares Getulio Vargas Foundation, Brazil University of Oslo, Norway

A practitioner paper is a completely different genre than a research paper. The challenge is that a practitioner paper is not easy to write. IS academics are not trained to write for practitioners. In our panel we will cover the nuances of writing for a practitioner audience.

Friday, August 11, 2023 | 2:00 – 3:30 p.m.

Generative AI and the future of technology: 2030 and Beyond

Panelists

  • Aaron M. French – Kennesaw State University (Moderator)
  • Kai Larsen – University of Colorado Boulder
  • Jyrki Penttinen – Synergy Solutions, Director
  • Jason Thatcher – Temple University
  • Gustavo Sanabria, CaptivatAR, CEO
  • John D’Arcy, University of Delaware

Generative AI and ChatGPT have taken the world by storm with ChatGPT reaching 100 million users in its first two months. ChatGPT was released in November 2022 utilizing Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) and GPT3.5, with GPT-4 introduced in March 2023. Generative AI has demonstrated significant impact in business and education already, but its culmination with other emerging technologies such as 5G and 6G, blockchain, and the metaverse provide endless opportunities and an array of challenges that must be addressed. This panel is composed of leading experts in academia and industry that will discuss the current state and future directions of Generative AI and the complimentary technologies that will drive the future. The panel will explore opportunities and challenges along with future directions in research.

Saturday, August 12, 2023 | 3:30 – 5:00 p.m.

Publishing in Information Systems Journal: The Case of the Latin American and Caribbean Association for Information Systems (LACAIS)

Panelists

  • Sutirtha Chatterjee (Moderator) – University of Nevada, Las Vegas (Moderator)
  • Andreas Eckhardt – University of Innsbruck
  • Luiz Joia – Getulio Vargas Foundation, Rio de Janeiro
  • Kui Du – University of Massachusetts, Boston
  • Michael Lee – University of Nevada, Las Vegas

This panel is conducted by senior and associate editors at Information Systems Journal (ISJ) to understand the relatively scarce submissions to ISJ (as well as subsequent publications) from the Global South, mainly the Latin American and Caribbean region. It has been historically observed that there are very few publications in ISJ whose authors are professionally situated within this research community. The aim of this panel is to investigate and discuss whether there are some systemic issues that are driving this phenomenon. Utilizing data from a survey distributed mostly among colleagues and members of the Latin American and Caribbean Association for Information Systems (LACAIS) community, the panelists discuss

certain challenges that were surfaced, and possible remedies on what could be done for ISJ to be more inclusive to authors from this geographical area.