Dr. Jim Spohrer Visiting the Nordic Centre for Internet and Society

On Wednesday, 8 May 2019, the Nordic Centre for Internet and Society had the privilege to host distinguished researcher Jim Spohrer, Director of Cognitive OpenTech at IBM. Jim Spohrer is a renowned expert on artificial intelligence, service science and business model design. The Nordic Centre's Peder Inge Furseth organized the visit. Jim Spohrer gave two talks to a large audience of managers and business leaders across various industries in Norway. The two talks showed the value of artificial intelligence and discussed future opportunities for business and society, for example AI's role in making human resource management more efficient and helping individuals with disabilities . At the same time, Jim Spohrer stressed some challenges in AI systems, for example in terms of explainability and fairness. In both presentations, Jim Spohrer highlighted the need for a balanced and customer-centric perspective to AI. He also discussed the importance of open source communities for AI development at IBM and in the tech industry more generally. The presentations were very well received and sparked engaged discussions with the audience. The slides are available here. After the two talks, the members of the Nordic Centre for Internet and Society had the opportunity to meet Jim Spohrer for a conversation about the ongoing research at the Centre. The meeting showed several points of common interest, for example in terms of the future of work, automatization and algorithmic accountability.