UKAIS 2021 Annual Conference

Date & Venue: 23-24 March 2021 – Online

Submission Deadline: Friday 5th of February 2021

Registration Fee: 100 GBP – The fee includes the doctoral consortium that will take place on the 22nd of March for doctoral students

CALL FOR PAPERS | PROGRAMME | KEYNOTES | DOCTORAL CONSORTIUM | INSTRUCTIONS

Navigating the ‘new normal’ – Information Systems for a post-pandemic world

The Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has caused unprecedented impacts on health and global economies. These impacts have resulted in a renewed interest in the use of Information Systems and Information Technologies (IS/IT) to respond to the health crisis and mitigate its effect on many industries and society. Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications have been deployed as part of the healthcare response, to understand COVID-19 transmission, improve detection rates, develop trial vaccines and treatments, and assess the socio-economic impacts of the pandemic (Bullock, Luccioni, Hoffmann Pham, Sin Nga Lam, & Luengo-Oroz, 2020). Semi-autonomous robots have delivered food, medication and equipment and helped with cleaning and sterilisation in hospitals (OECD, 2020). Mobile robots have reminded parkgoers of social distancing requirements in Singapore, delivered food to residents staying at home in urban areas in the UK and represented isolating students at university graduation ceremonies in Japan (Tucker, 2020). Business continuity responses due to the unavailability of human workers have deployed AI for support content monitoring on YouTube, and chatbots are being used for customer service work (Howard & Borenstein, 2020). There has also been a significant shift in the use of IS/IT, such as video conferencing tools to maintain contact in the workplace and for social interactions.

The widespread and rapidly increasing application of IS/IT in many aspects of our lives is reinvigorating existing and creating important new debates. For example, whether COVID-19 will be the tipping point for increased use of AI and robotics to automate work (Coombs, 2020) how big data may be organised and shared without compromising human rights (Günther, Mehrizi, Huysman, & Feldberg, 2017), how the balance between office based and remote working may evolve, and whether COVID-19 will spark a transformation in the accessibility and delivery of global higher education (The Guardian, 2020). While the post COVID-19 future remains uncertain, it is clear that IS/IT will be at the heart of the global recovery. IS scholars have an essential role in providing timely research insights that can help governments society and business navigate this new normal.

To this end the UKAIS 2021 international conference welcomes submissions that explore how IS/IT may be used to navigate the new normal. For example, submissions may consider the post-covid impacts on:

  • Artificial Intelligence systems
  • Bridging the Digital Divide: emancipatory IS
  • Business Intelligence and Decision Support
  • Business Process Management
  • eBusiness and Competitive Strategy
  • Economics and the Value of IS
  • eGovernment Solutions to the Citizen
  • Enterprise Systems
  • European and Cultural Issues in IS
  • Healthcare Information Systems
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Inter-Organizational Systems
  • Innovative Applications of IS in Teaching
  • IS Diversity and Diversity in IS
  • IS Artefacts and IS Artefact Design
  • IS Innovation, Adoption and Diffusion
  • IS Governance and Sourcing
  • Research Methods and Philosophy
  • Project Management and IS Development
  • Social Media
  • Service Engineering and Service Management
  • Ubiquitous and Mobile Information Systems
  • Technologies to Promote a Healthy and Secure Society

References

Bullock, J., Luccioni, A., Hoffmann Pham, K., Sin Nga Lam, C., & Luengo-Oroz, M. (2020). Mapping the landscape of Artificial Intelligence applications against COVID-19. ArXiv. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.11336.pdf

Coombs, C. (2020). Will COVID-19 be the Tipping Point for the Intelligent Automation of Work? A Review of the Debate and Implications for Research. International Journal of Information Management. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2020.102182

Günther, W. A., Mehrizi, M. H. R., Huysman, M., & Feldberg, F. (2017). Debating big data: A literature review on realizing value from big data. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 26, 191–209. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsis.2017.07.003

Howard, A., & Borenstein, J. (2020). AI, Robots, and Ethics in the Age of COVID-19. Retrieved May 18, 2020, from https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/ai-robots-and-ethics-in-the-age-of-covid-19/

OECD. (2020). Using artificial intelligence to help combat COVID-19. OECD. https://doi.org/10.1787/eedfee77-en

The Guardian. (2020). “Students like the flexibility”: why online universities are here to stay. Retrieved June 26, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/may/27/students-like-the-flexibility-why-online-universities-are-here-to-stay

Tucker, I. (2020, May). The five: robots helping to tackle coronavirus. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/31/the-five-robots-helping-to-tackle-coronavirus