DigiEra

In the Summer of 2019, members of the Group together with members from the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, organized a multidisciplinary research conference to examine the imminent questions that digital technologies and machine intelligence raise for our society. The three-day conference was held at the Monte Verità conference center in Ascona, Switzerland, and brought together 75 scholars from 17 countries covering the fields of management, organization, computer science, and philosophy, among others. The program included 43 sessions, including a workshop on “Applications of machine learning in different disciplines” by Prof. Ce Zhang from the DS3Lab at ETH Zurich, a panel discussion between industry executives and leading scholars, seven keynote speeches, and twelve paper sessions. The conference received competitive funding from the Congressi Stefano Franscini, the Hasler Foundation and the Swiss National Science Foundation. Among the outcomes of the conference, participants reported high cross-fertilization of ideas across disciplines engaged with AI; discussions, debates, and feedbacks during and after the conference collectively gave rise to a collection of working papers to be submitted to a special issue on digitization, hosted at the journal Organization Science, and a special issue on internet of things, hosted at Technovation, two leading journals in the fields of organization and innovation; enhanced engagement from local business leaders and the knowledge transfer from academia to industry; new collaborations and strengthening of participants’ networks, including those with other departments within ETH and with colleagues from academic institutions across the globe.